FRANKFORT, Ky. (July 25, 2018) – Kentucky now has an agreed upon set of healthcare measurement priorities. The Kentucky Core Healthcare Measures Set (KCHMS) was developed through a public-private partnership between the Kentucky Department for Medicaid Services (KDMS), within the Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS), and the Kentuckiana Health Collaborative (KHC). The commonwealth becomes one of the first states in the nation to enact a healthcare measurement set.
The purpose of this effort is to get Kentucky’s health plans and employers to reward primary care and pediatric providers on a shared set of relevant measures to drive improved health, quality of care, and value, to reduce administrative complexity, and to align healthcare organizations to have a shared focus.
For the last year, over 70 experts that provide, pay, purchase, and consume healthcare across Kentucky met as members of the Kentucky Performance Measures Alignment Committee (PMAC). They identified Kentucky’s current measurement situation is as follows:
- Insurers and government programs define quality differently and are often unaligned in scope and focus
- Primary care providers are incented on too many quality measures, 89 in 2018
- Providers and their teams are overwhelmed with the burden of state, federal, and commercial measurement requirements
The new core measures set contains 32 measures, less than half of the number of 89 currently incented measures in Kentucky by various state and national programs. Measures are focused in the areas of prevention, pediatrics, chronic and acute care management, behavioral health, and cost/utilization. The PMAC team is currently requesting letters of support from key healthcare organizations
“It has been truly inspiring to see Kentucky’s various stakeholders come together for the good of Kentucky’s residents to drive improvements in health,” said Stephanie Clouser, KHC data scientist and PMAC coordinator.
“The Kentucky Medicaid team, which includes not only state government representation, but also partners from nationally prominent health insurance corporations, is committed to ensuring that every citizen can access health care that is proven in terms of quality and patient experience,” concluded Chief Medical Officer for Kentucky Medicaid, Gil Liu, MD, MS. “We look forward to building on this highly collaborative work of developing a core set of measures, to go forward and successfully accomplish measurably better health outcomes.”
The full list of measures can be found here. A public webinar will be held on Thursday, July 26, from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. EST, to give an overview of the initiative and give Kentucky’s healthcare stakeholders a chance to ask questions of PMAC Chairs Gil Liu, KDMS, and Randa Deaton, KHC.
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