Getting physicians and others to comply with your healthcare organization’s clinical quality measure reporting requirements can be tricky. However, experts say you can convert those negative habits into positive practices in your clinic or hospital by using proven behavioral psychology techniques.

The road to quality improvement and value-based care is paved with clinical quality measures. But there are many potholes, hazards and detours along the way that can slow you down. What can your hospital, health system or medical practice do to avoid these roadblocks and successfully reach your destination?

This week CMS released the full nationwide results of the second year of MIPS. Participation is at 98% and of the participants 98% met or exceeded the minimum score of 15 points. What they neglected to highlight was the maximum amount of reimbursement anyone across the country received was a 1.68% increase to their Medicare Part B reimbursement. But for those of you frustrated by the maximum effort you give to the program with the minuscule return, there is hope.

As we say goodbye to the teen years of this century and move beyond the decade of Meaningful Use, it is a good time to look back on how quality measurement and reporting has evolved, and more importantly, where it may be headed. Several key trends in motion are likely to continue next year and beyond.

A Critical Access Hospital has many things to worry about. Ensuring that your organization is financially sound and an ever-present resource for your community is always a top priority. Valerie Lopez, Uvalde’s CFO was primarily responsible for building custom indicators to measure their financial performance against other Critical Access Hospitals nationwide. Today she shares with us how she did it.

It’s a fact of life that making New Year’s resolutions is easy, but sticking to them is harder. How many times have you vowed to dust off the treadmill and actually use it, only for it to continue gathering dust until the following New Year’s Eve?

It’s the same with electronic clinical quality measures, or eCQMs. It’s easy to say that you’re going to stop just “checking boxes” and start using them in a meaningful way to improve the quality and safety of patient care at your hospital, health system or medical practice. The truth is that it’s harder to do in reality.

What do you do when you’re told that your healthcare system is being switched from one chart-abstracted vendor to another? In short, you do a lot.

This is the situation BJC health care found themselves in this year as one of the 350+ clients that transitioned from the Vizient chart-abstracted software over to the Medisolv chart-abstracted ENCOR software.

There were only 160 hospitals nationwide that participated in the CMS voluntary hybrid readmission measure pilot and Memorial Health Care Systems was one of them. Taunya Schlueter is a clinical analyst at Memorial Health and was instrumental in implementing the hybrid measure pilot program for her hospital. Today she shares with us what that process looked like and why it was important for her hospital to participate.

Ahh Thanksgiving. What a great holiday. A day to be full of gratefulness, love and too much stuffing.

This week we are taking a break from our usual education to bring you something fun. A personality quiz! A healthcare quality reporting personality quiz to be exact.

This scripted conversation between a quality analyst and a director of quality management might not be real, but one thing’s for sure: You’ll need to get to know CMS’ new hybrid readmission measure sooner than you think.