The new reports follow recommendations shared with HHS for approximately 200 performance measures under consideration for use in 20 federal healthcare programs, 67 of which apply specifically to hospitals and PAC/LTC settings.

In its Considerations for Selection of Measures for Federal Programs: Hospitals report, MAP identified several overarching issues, including the need for high-value measures that are meaningful to consumers and will drive significant improvements in the quality and efficiency of care, as well as the need to increase alignment of measures across programs.

In its Considerations for Selection of Measures for Federal Programs: Post-Acute Care/Long-Term Care report, MAP recommended that HHS emphasize moving to similar measures to promote patient-centered care across PAC/LTC programs, coordinate efforts between patient assessment instruments used in PAC/LTC settings, and align performance measurement across PAC/LTC settings to ensure comparability of performance and to facilitate information exchange.

The work to strengthen quality in the PAC setting was enabled by the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act of 2014.

MAP also made specific recommendations for the programs in the reports. For example, MAP noted that the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program should recognize that not all readmissions denote poor quality, so planned and unrelated readmissions should be excluded from the measures in the program.