CMS Posts Stage 2 Clinical Quality Measures

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has posted the clinical quality measures for Stage 2 under meaningful use of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act/Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (ARRA/HITECH). This comes approximately one month after CMS posted the proposed rules for Stage 2 around the HIMSS12 conference.

In order to comply with Stage 2 of meaningful use, physicians must complete 12 of the 125 clinical quality measures from various areas including patient/family engagement, population health, and others. CMS notes on its website, “some of these measures are still in development; therefore, the descriptions provided in these tables may change before the final rule is published.” Some of the measures haven’t been endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF), a non-profit which the HHS has brought in to develops healthcare-related benchmarks.  

The clinical quality measures can be found here. The CMS is taking public comments on the proposed rule until May. 7.