Health Care Quality and Safety: Guidelines & Measures

The Affordable Care Act is designed to control health care costs and improve quality of care. The federal government has created several tools that allow you to compare hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, and dialysis facilities.

This publication reviews findings of a committee convened to discuss core measures for health care and outlines a set of 15 standardized measures to optimize performance assessment and develop data that drives progress.

Each topic features the best available knowledge for improvement in that area, including tools, literature, and changes that you can implement and measure to help speed improvement in healthcare organizations.

CMS and The Joint Commission collaborated to create one common set of measure specifications documentation known as the Specifications Manual for National Hospital Inpatient Quality Measures to be used by both organizations. The Manual contains common (i.e., identical) data dictionary, measure information forms, and algorithms.

NHSN is a secure, internet-based surveillance system that enables healthcare facilities to collect and use data about healthcare-associated infections, adherence to clinical practices known to prevent healthcare-associated infections, the incidence or prevalence of multidrug-resistant organisms within their organizations, and other adverse events.

NQMC is a public resource for evidence-based quality measures and measure sets. You can browse measure summaries by topic, organization, or domain and compare two or more measure summaries in a side-by-side comparison.

On the CUSP: Stop HAI is a joint effort of the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET), the Johns Hopkins University Quality and Safety Research Group (JHU QSRG), and the Michigan Health and Hospital Association Keystone Center for Patient Safety and Quality (MHA Keystone), through a contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), to dramatically reduce hospital-acquired infections in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), QualityNet provides healthcare quality improvement news, resources and data reporting tools and applications used by healthcare providers and others. It Is the only CMS-approved website for secure communications and healthcare quality data exchange between: quality improvement organizations (QIOs), hospitals, physician offices, nursing homes, end stage renal disease (ESRD) networks and facilities, and data vendors.