MedAssurant enters agreement with NCQA to develop new measures of healthcare quality

MedAssurant Inc., a leading provider of data-driven healthcare solutions, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), the organization that maintains the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS ®)—the most widely used performance measurement tool in healthcare and a core component of the Medicare Star Rating system—to support the development of new measures of healthcare quality that NCQA is developing under a contract it has with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).  

MedAssurant brings its extensive analytic capabilities and datasets to NCQA, who is currently working to develop measures to assess quality of care as reflected in preventable hospital admissions.  These include readmissions, which are costly events that may be associated with breakdowns in the quality of hospital or transitional care.  NCQA's measures will give purchasers, including CMS, insight into the quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries.

"The problem of readmissions is a real and significant one," said Margaret E. O'Kane, NCQA's president.  "Recent data published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest that almost one in every five hospital admissions paid for by Medicare leads to a readmission within 30-days of discharge.  That costs the government—and the public—almost $20 billion annually and significantly affects the quality of life of the patients and families who have to deal with the fear and dislocation that hospitalization creates."

Cary Sennett, M.D., Ph.D., chief medical officer at MedAssurant, who previously served as executive vice president of NCQA, added, "NCQA's work in general—and HEDIS in particular—play a critical role in enabling value-based purchasing.  The federal government has signaled very clearly through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), that it will be looking to buy value, and hospital readmission is a cornerstone to Medicare's value-based purchasing agenda.  MedAssurant is delighted to have the opportunity to work closely with NCQA to build on the work that we have already done to evaluate hospital readmission rates in the Medicare population and to ensure that measures that support national efforts to evaluate care are both scientifically grounded and empirically validated."