Quality Measures: Tools for Quality Health Care Services - Essay Sample

Introduction

Quality health care is of a high priority to any given Medicare center because of the benefits that the patients earn. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), come up with procedures that are used in quality control of the services offered in Health care sectors. Thereby there are indicators that are used to indicate results or feedback on the services offered in health care organization. The quality services are measured by quality measures. Quality measures are tools that are commonly used to measure the patient's feedback on the quality of services offered and measurement of the key strategies that are taken for the organization's success. Therefore there are various key indicators brought about by the CMS that are used for quality measurement procedure. They include The Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program that involves getting reports from the inpatient sectors, The Hospital Outpatient Quality Reporting Program that revolves around the outpatient results and the Physical quality Reporting System. These indicators are with the aim of coming up with quality services that aim towards achieving the organizational goals.

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The Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program is an indicator used by CMS so as to realize the basic feedback of the Inpatient. This includes the services that are received by the patients that are admitted in the health care local hospitals. It is through the inpatient reports that an organization gets to know whether they are working towards achieving the set goals or not. In a case that the Inpatient reports are negative, it is upon the organization to look for more complex strategies that can be able to suit the needs of their patients (Hennessy, S., Leonard, C., Palumbo, C., Newcomb, C., & Bilker, W. 2007). The second indicator that is used by the CMS is the Hospital Outpatient Quality Reporting Program that involves getting reports that are based on the outpatient program. In a hospital, this involves the emergency department, the X-rays, lab tests, and many more. The outpatient is basically the reports that daily in-coming patients provide concerning the quality of the services that they receive in the various health care sectors. It will help in evaluating the quality of care that patients are provided with. The services that are offered in the local hospitals are able to be evaluated and measured so as to come up with possible solutions to deal with sectors that customers are not completely satisfied with its services.

There are various impacts that are realized on the quality indicators due to the existence of nursing care. The nursing care makes the outpatient program efficient because the patient gets to acquire the nursing services. A quality programming and organization in the local hospitals is the key to the achievement of the success that involves proper nursing care in the hospitals. The nursing care brings about both positively and negatively impact the health care set up. These can be brought about when a patient gets complete nursing care of his or her need, and a positive report is indicated on the reports and data collected. On the other hand, it will require restructuring in a case that the patient exemplifies a negative response.

There are various key strategies that are considered to improve quality indicators. To begin with, the Pay for Reporting Program that involves Medicare making a payment on the delivery of the reports concerning the physicians report on procedures involved. Through this program, improvement is realized on the quality indicators because much more data and information are realized. The second strategy that can improve the quality indicators is through public reporting (Mukamel et al., 2008). The Hospital Outpatient Quality Reporting Program is the most covered in a case; the public reporting is put to the utter because it contributes a lot. Public reporting is closely related to the basic outpatient reporting program. The public reporting enables Medicare to get the readily available perception of the patients that visit the local hospitals regularly. The most important priorities are then taken from the data and information so as to come up with an improvement in the quality indicators. In conclusion, it is, therefore, upon the Medical care Organizations to consider the data and information acquired from its quality measures so as to come up with better strategies for achieving the organizational goals.

References

Hennessy, S., Leonard, C., Palumbo, C., Newcomb, C., & Bilker, W. (2007). Quality of Medicaid and Medicare Data Obtained through Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Medical Care, 45(12), 1216-1220. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40221605

Mukamel, D., Glance, L., Li, Y., Weimer, D., Spector, W., Zinn, J., & Mosqueda, L. (2008). Does Risk Adjustment of the CMS Quality Measures for Nursing Homes Matter? Medical Care, 46 (5), 532-541. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40221696