Primary Care Practice Accountability Measure Set

摘要

Care coordination has been recognized as an important aspect of high quality, patient-centered care, and was identified by the National Priorities Partnership as a priority area for improving health care delivery in the U.S. Much work remains to be done to elucidate how best to achieve coordinated care and how care coordination relates to important outcomes such as hospitalization rates, readmissions, mortality, quality of life, and patient satisfaction. Yet even as this evidence base is developing, efforts are underway across the health care system to evaluate and improve care coordination. Robust measures of care coordination processes are essential tools for generating evidence about care coordination and its outcomes; evaluating current practices; designing, implementing and assessing improvement activities; and supporting payment initiatives that target care coordination. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recognizes a particularly urgent need for measures that may be used in assessing or recognizing care coordination as it is carried out by primary care practices. Such measures may be used by health plans, insurers, or other payers to assess or recognize the degree and quality of coordination performed by primary care practices, as well as by practices themselves in assessing, and ultimately improving, their own performance.