For the field of complex care to show its value in improving outcomes and to evaluate programs’ delivery and impact, there is a need to identify and standardize measures that are used for evaluation, quality improvement, and payment. While historically complex care has relied on metrics around healthcare cost and utilization patterns, the Blueprint for Complex Care recommends that the field adopt standard quality measures that can help programs and systems assess their impact on participants’ quality of life, recovery, and progress toward individual goals in addition to healthcare utilization and cost.
In response to this recommendation from the Blueprint, the National Center commissioned the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to conduct a landscape analysis, interviews with subject matter experts, and a scan of existing quality measurement efforts pertaining to the field of complex care.
The resulting report, Measuring complexity: Moving toward standardized quality measures for the field of complex care, documents the current state of quality measurement in complex care, identifying key challenges and detailing current efforts. It contains eight recommendations for next steps the field can take to develop a standard set of quality measures, including a proposed set of measurement domains and subdomains to structure future measure sets. An accompanying brief summarizes the report.
The recording of a webinar on the Measuring complexity report, featuring the report’s authors and other leaders from the complex care field, can be found here.