Survey Results: eCQMs vs Core Measure Performance

Over the course of the last decade, there has been a significant shift in the way hospitals track and assess their quality measures. Ten years ago, most hospitals were significantly burdened with dozens of Core measures that they were required to abstract. When eCQMs (Electronic Clinical Quality Measures) came on to the scene no one really knew what to make of them or how much effort should be given to these measures. Now in 2019, eCQMs have become much more common.

Medisolv wanted to find out if there were any interesting differences in the way hospitals think about their Core measures versus their eCQMs. We heard from a lot of people in the quality department, many directors of quality and the abstractors too. Below are the results from our website survey. How does your hospital compare?

Ease of Completion/Access

We asked our participants about their ease of use with these two different types of measures. In general, our participants believed that both their Core measures and eCQMs had a relatively high ease of use. 

Since these two measures are not calculated the same, we asked the question in two different ways. For a hospital’s Core measure performance, we wanted to know how difficult participants found it to complete their chart abstraction. And on the eCQM side, we wanted to know how difficult it was to access and view their eCQM performance.

For more information on the difference between abstraction and eCQMs see this past post.

eCQMs

Core Measures

Confidence in Quality Data

If you had asked participants a few years ago to rank their level of confidence of their core measures versus their eCQMs, I suspect more people felt confident in their Core measure performance. But according to our study, more people are becoming confident in their eCQM performance data. It is still lower than the confidence level you find for Core measure performance, but eCQMs are gaining on it.

ECQMs

Core Measures

Confidence in the data is one thing, but the best organizations find a way to use this data for good. Our survey wanted to know if hospitals were using the data they received from their Core and eCQM performance to drive improvements in their hospitals.

Putting the Data to Use

The results below show that while respondents have a good way of accessing, completing and reviewing their data they don’t all have the same way of improving their processes. Some organizations have a vendor that they rely on to help drive improvements while others mainly use software reports without help and yet others don't have a process in place at all. The responses are mixed.

ECQMs

Core Measures

Collaborative Culture

In our experience, our best-performing clients tend to have good cross-departmental collaboration. Those hospitals that have good communication between their Quality and IT departments tend to have better performance results. From the information below it appears that most hospitals have some cross-communication but, in general, would not call it regular communication.

ECQMs

Core Measures

Something interesting to note here is that hospitals that regularly communicate with their IT department to review their eCQM results were more likely to say they were confident in their eCQM data. Seems pretty obvious right? The more you communicate with your IT team the more likely you are to get better eCQM results.

Regular Education

Finally, we wanted to know how often hospitals were or were not educating their staff and department heads on their measure performance. It appears that hospitals do educate their staff about both measures regularly, but more so on the Core measures side as opposed to education on eCQMs.

ECQMs

Core Measures

The Medisolv Difference

One last thing we want to mention here is the difference in responses between Medisolv clients and non-Medisolv clients. We think the numbers speak for themselves. 

ECQMs

Core Measures

When you have a quality management partner like Medisolv that can guide you through your quality journey, from start to finish, you can feel good about the accuracy of your data. 

If you’re looking for someone to help you with implementation, validation and submission of eCQMs, send us a note. We’d love to chat and see if we’re a good fit for your hospital.