Quality Measures
The Alliance today is focused on a few key areas of quality measure advocacy: (1) Continued development of wound care-relevant QCDR measures, (2) Enabling clinicians across the wound care team to qualify for the newly incentivized Medicare payment system, and (3) Improving reimbursement through group reporting of quality measures.
Continued development of wound care-relevant QCDR measures
Of primary concern is that the obligatory reporting of quality, resource use and clinical performance measures may not truly be indicative of our wound care work nor of the resources that we use to treat patients. We need outcome measures for advanced therapeutics like negative pressure and cellular products to ensure we can tie the cost of these interventions to the improved outcomes achieved with them.
On January 1, 2017, CMS began a new method for determining Medicare payments to Qualified Health Professionals (QHPs) like physicians and nurse practitioners. Most QHPs are subject to the Merit Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) which requires, among other things, the reporting of quality data. Data are usually reported to CMS through Qualified Clinical Data Registries (QCDRs).
CMS has approved the US Wound Registry (USWR) as a MIPS registry. A complete list of the USWR wound care measures can be found on the USWR website.
CMS has approved the US Wound Registry (USWR) as a MIPS registry. A complete list of the USWR wound care measures can be found on the USWR website.
The Alliance of Wound Care Stakeholders has been a long time champion of quality measures for the wound care space. When CMS opened the door in 2014 to development of quality measures in conjunction with a Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR), the Alliance – together with the U.S. Wound Registry (USWR) – developed 14 quality measures specific to wound management which were subsequently approved by CMS.
