CMS Administrator Verma Issues Blog on Medicaid Efforts to Measure Quality

On October 2, 2018, Seema Verma, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published a blog post discussing CMS’ recent focus on evaluating the quality of supports offered, given the growth of the Medicaid program.

As Administrator Verma wrote:

“Yet as program costs have continued to rise, we have failed to deliver a level of transparency and accountability for achieving positive outcomes commiserate with our significant investment. But this is finally beginning to change. […]

Last week, we released the latest Federal Fiscal Year 2017 quality measurement data from the Medicaid and CHIP Child and Adult Core Sets that states have voluntarily reported to CMS. We greatly appreciate the work our state partners have endured to report these measures. CMS recognizes that quality reporting can present a significant administrative burden for both states and providers, and has taken steps to reduce this burden through our Meaningful Measures initiative.  In the future, we hope to leverage existing and more automated data reporting systems to generate these Medicaid measures on behalf of states, thereby reducing reporting burden while also improving data consistency, comparability, and comprehensiveness. ” [Emphasis added by ANCOR.]

The Administrator’s blog post also mentioned two core sets of health care quality measures that can be used to assess the quality of health care provided to children and adults enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP. She furthermore announced that more states are transitioning from the Medicaid Statistical Information System (MSIS) to the Transformed-MSIS (T-MSIS). She concludes: “With these data in hand, we are shifting our efforts to continuous data quality review and improvement–a collaboration we will sustain with states.”