Recommendations for the MA Health Care Quality and Cost Council’s Three-Year Reporting Plan

What We Did:

MHQP was selected by the Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council to create a three-year plan for publicly reporting quality and cost measures on the Council’s consumer-facing website (no longer active).

Areas investigated for the reporting plan included:

• Care settings
• Clinical conditions
• Quality measures, including measures of process, outcome, and structure as well as patient safety and patients’ experience of care
• Cost, volume and utilization measures
• Reporting frequency for each measure type
• Benchmarks for each measure type that would allow for valid comparisons among entities
• Reporting thresholds for each measure type that would ensure sufficient providers were included

Who Was Involved:

MHQP partnered with Milliman, Inc. on this project.

Why This Work Matters:

This was the first attempt by the state to bring together a variety of constituencies to agree upon quality and cost measures. This work was a precursor to work done by the state’s Quality Measurement Alignment Task Force, which was required by state legislation, and the public reporting of cost and quality data by state agencies.