Improve Patient Care and Your Bottom Line
Discover the difference Clinical Quality Measures can make for your practice
A Shift in Medical Care
Clinical quality measures (CQMs) and other population health metrics show a change in how payers, such as Medicare and Medicaid, compensate for treatment. Instead of basing payments on patient volume, now they emphasize care quality. Assessing your practice’s CQMs will help you to make the shift in treatment required to improve patient care, prevent problems, and help your bottom line.
Demonstrate Your Ability to Offer High-Quality Care
Clinical quality measures (CQMs) give your practice the opportunity to showcase your exceptional level of care. These metrics assess your practice’s capacity for delivering patient-centric care that emphasizes quality.
CMS uses these metrics to ensure that practices that accept Medicare and Medicaid meet best practices in treatment quality. The system tracks 270 metrics. Your practice must submit 60 percent or more of eligible instances for the measurements.
Focus on the Big Picture of Population Health Metrics
Monitoring CQMs only gives you one piece of the larger picture of the population health of your practice’s patients. Aside from CQMs, other population health metrics your practice may track include care gap analysis and chronic care management.
Care gap analysis highlights areas in which patients may benefit from chronic care management or preventative care. Chronic care management ensures that you get compensation for all interactions with patients who have chronic conditions. Even non-billable contacts count as parts of this chronic care management metric that improves care for those with long-term conditions.
All three measurements help small and large practices alike to improve patient treatment. Your practice should consider adopting the three as a package to optimize care and benefit from new monitoring programs from Medicare that focus on better care.
Move your practice into the next phase of treatment by focusing on higher-quality care instead of a higher number of patients. Tracking population health metrics keeps your practice profitable as you make the change.
Meet Your Metrics
The CQM metrics number in the hundreds, but all examine various elements of delivering quality patient care. A few of the types of measures include:
- Coordination of care
- Clinical processes used
- Adherence to guidelines for clinical practice
- Patient involvement in care
- Efficiency in the use of healthcare resources
- Health outcomes for patients
- Safety for patients
- Public and population health metrics
Despite the numerous types of measurements, by delivering quality, patient-centric care, your practice can meet many of the basic requirements to earn appropriate compensation.
Assessing Your Practice
By assessing your practice on CQMs, you can qualify for incentives based on improvements or high performance in offering quality care. To evaluate your practice, you’ll need tools to help you with data collection, analysis, and measurement. These tools can make monitoring your practice’s status per the CQMs simpler and easier for you. With CQM tools, you spend less time crunching numbers and more time improving patient care.
Additionally, your practice avoids penalties for not delivering the assessment data completely or at the minimum levels of care and optimizing the health of your patients. Good data supported by quality practices will improve your bottom line and help your patients enjoy exceptional care.
What You and Your Patients Get by Finding Patient Care Gaps
Tracking CQMs comes with innate incentives to make the investment profitable for your practice. You and your patients gain the following benefits from integrating CQM tracking tools:
Patients may have a single provider treating them for a condition or an entire team of experts working toward the best treatment methods possible. Regardless of the number of providers caring for each patient, all practitioners must put patients at the center of the treatment. Better care includes improved communication and coordination among those treating a patient. Even those working in different facilities on a patient’s team should easily work with each other for quality care delivery.
To ensure that your practice works toward making patient-centered care a priority, CQMs include metrics on improving every aspect of care delivery for patients. Monitoring CQMs and meeting baseline requirements or exceeding them shows that your patients have excellent care from all members of your practice they see. Improved care leads to better outcomes for your patients.
Patient care today does not look like the care generations in the past received. Once, people only went to the doctor to correct a developed problem. However, the importance of prevention and allowing patients to become active members of their treatment are hallmarks of today’s medical practices.
Preventative care puts patients in charge of their health. They take more control over their lifestyle and daily living choices that could impact their health in the future. By partnering with your practitioner, patients getting preventative care or education can feel more empowered and positive about their health and health care.
CQMs make preventative care a pillar of patient-centered treatment models because it greatly helps patients and payers by preventing problems before they happen and saving money. Your practice will help patients to live healthier lives by preventing major health issues.
Better care and CQM tracking boost your bottom line in multiple ways. First, your patients will remain healthier and loyal to your practice if they receive quality care. They may also spread positive reviews of your practice to others, helping your site to grow its patient base.
More practically, your bottom line will increase because you’ll avoid penalties and receive incentives for meeting the base requirements for various CQMs.
Learn More About Our CQM Module and Other Population Health Products at Amazing Charts
Uncover ways to get the compensation your practice deserves for providing patient-centered care. With our CQM module, you have the metrics available to track and improve patient health care while meeting CMS requirements. Learn more about our CQM module and other population health products. Contact us at Amazing Charts to get the tools your practice needs to offer patients smarter and better care.
