Heads Up: HEDIS® Public Comment Starts Soon
June 21, 2017 · Sepheen Byron
At NCQA, we strive to ensure that HEDIS® health plan performance measures are relevant and feasible, and that they continuously push the health care system to improve.
We do that by developing new measures to address important areas of the health care system. However, equally important is retiring measures that are no longer useful.
To that end, NCQA is piloting a streamlined, off-cycle retirement process to assess effective ways to retire HEDIS measures. NCQA will integrate successful elements from the pilot into the NCQA retirement and reevaluation process, which will allow more rapid response and flexibility.
NCQA is assessing three measures during this retirement pilot:
- Annual Monitoring for Patients on Persistent Medications. This measure, which evaluates whether patients taking ongoing medications have received appropriate monitoring, has consistently high performance with low variation, leaving little opportunity for organizations to improve.
- Children and Adolescents’ Access to Primary Care Practitioners. This measure, which assesses whether children/adolescents had a primary care visit, has consistently high performance with low variation, and could be redundant to other measures assessing receipt of well-care visits.
- Frequency of Ongoing Prenatal Care. This measure, assessing how many prenatal visits a pregnant woman received, could be redundant with the Timeliness of Prenatal and Postpartum Care measure, which assesses both prenatal visits and whether those visits happened at recommended intervals.
NCQA welcomes feedback on whether to retire these measures from HEDIS. An important part of updating HEDIS is giving the public the opportunity to review and comment on suggested changes. NCQA reviews all comments received during the public comment period and uses feedback to inform our deliberation process.
How to Participate in Public Comment
The public comment period ends at 11:59 PM (ET) on July 27.
NCQA will review feedback and vet with stakeholders per our process. If a measure is approved for retirement, we plan to announce it in the HEDIS 2018 October Technical Update.
HEDIS® is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).
