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Last updated 1/10/07
The Quality Improvement Committee (QIC) developed a set of criteria to use in the review of proposed performance measures for improvement purposes and possible ACCP endorsement. These criteria will not only define the scope of the group’s determinations but also the specific standards by which the performance measures should be evaluated.
QIC objectives:
- Reliable and valid criteria
- Measurability
- Clinical applicability
- Ease of implementation, including education on implementation
Criteria for Assessment of Performance Measures:
- Practicality for ACCP members and their patients
- Helpful to ACCP members, including physicians, nurses, and other practitioners
- Appropriate to the diversity of physicians and type of hospitals of ACCP members, including variation in practice size and location
- Ease of data collection for ACCP members
- Any other barriers that are specific to ACCP chest, critical care, and sleep medicine physicians
- Importance
- Assesses an important leverage point for improving quality: significant to target audiences; impact on health
- Opportunity for improvement, considerable variation in quality of care exists
- Aspect of quality is under provider or health system control
- This measure does not create incentives or rewards to improve without truly improving quality of care
- Scientific acceptability
- Relationship to quality is based on best available scientific evidence
- Well defined and precisely specified
- Valid and measures the intended aspect of quality; accurately represents the concept being evaluated; data sources are comparable
- Adequate proportion of total variation is explained by provider performance and amount of variation in measurement is small after provider performance and patient characteristics are taken into account
- Reliable, producing the same results a high proportion of time in the same population
- Precise, adequately discriminating between real differences in provider performance and reasonable sample size exists to detect actual differences; captures all possible cases and bias related to case exclusion or limited data are minimal
- Risk adjustment is adequate to address confounding bias, if applicable
- Usability
- Effective (understandable and clear) presentation and dissemination strategies exist
- Statistical testing can be applied to communicate when differences in performance levels are greater than would be expected by chance
- Has been used effectively in the past and/or have high potential for working well with other indicators currently in use
- Compelling content for stakeholder decision making
- Feasibility
- Consistent construction and assessment of the measure
- Feasible to calculate; benefits exceed financial and administrative burden of
implementation
- Confidentiality concerns are addressed
- Audit strategy can be implemented, quality of data is known
Overall, is this performance measure acceptable as written? |
