Over the last two years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has introduced health equity initiatives across the entire healthcare landscape. These new regulations require screening questions for every hospital inpatient in acute and psychiatric facilities and in doctors’ offices nationwide. The burden of implementing and reporting these measures falls to Quality leaders. CMS kept the requirements broad so organizations could implement these screening measures in whatever way makes sense for them. Unfortunately, broad options provide little guidance for the best long-term solution in the face of CMS’s ambitious plan to transition to fully digital quality measurement in the next decade. How should quality leaders build out health equity screening questions now, so they aren’t stuck re-doing their work in five years when CMS changes requirements again and transitions to fully digital reporting?
In this presentation, Lifepoint Health will provide a comprehensive overview of how equity and digital transformation are impacting how we capture, measure, and report healthcare quality data. Attendees will gain best practices and checklists for incorporating CMS’s new Social Drivers of Health (SDOH) measures as Electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) and building out all clinical documentation as dQMs.
Learning Objectives:
- Discuss the challenges facing the industry today as it relates to the ever-increasing health-equity requirements and the necessity of structuring equity information digitally to prepare for a dQM reality.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the CMS SDOH requirements and describe the best techniques for rolling this out at individual facilities.
- Formulate ideas for how your organization could prepare for the digital shift now in the context of new health equity initiatives and help bridge the gap between the current state and CMS’s ideal state of digital measurement. reporting these measures.