CMS Posts Final 2014 Clinical Quality Measures

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) posted the final Clinical Quality Measures (CQMS) for 2014 on its website, the government agency reported. CQMs will change in 2014 for providers, and those that are eligible for meaningful use, either Stage 1 or Stage 2, will have included the new criteria in their EHRs, CMS says.

For eligible professionals (EPs) there are 64 CQMs in total and they will have to report on nine of them. For eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals, there are 29 CQMs and 16 of them will have to be included.

In addition, CMS has made available the specifications for electronic reporting and access to the related data elements and value sets. According to CMS, “value sets define clinical concepts, providing a list of numerical values (e.g. code values from ICD-9, SNOMED CT, etc.) and individual descriptions for the clinical concepts (e.g. diabetes, clinical visit) used to define the quality measures. Each clinical concept referenced in a clinical quality measure is represented by a set of code values (a value set) it may take on.”