Assignment 1: Measuring Quality Guidelines and Grading Rubric

By Day 7 in Week 5

In an 8 to 10 page paper, describe three rate based measurements of quality.

Select three rate based measurements of quality that you will use as the primary basis for this paper.

These measurements must relate to some aspect of clinical or service quality that directly relates to patient care or the patient’s experience of care. For the purposes of this assignment, an analysis of staffing levels is not permitted. You can find useful information on quality indicators that are of interest to you on these websites and resources. You may choose only one of the three measures to be some form of patient satisfaction measure.

Deconstruct each measure to include descriptions of the following:

• The definition of the measure
• The numerical description of how the measurement is constructed (the numerator/denominator measure counts, the formula used to construct the rate, etc.)
• Explain how the data for this measure are collected
• Describe how the measurement is compared externally to other like settings; differentiate between the actual rate and a percentile ranking.
• Explain whether the measure is risk adjusted or not. If so, explain briefly how this is accomplished.
• Describe how goals might be set for each measure in an aggressive organization, which is seeking to excel in the marketplace.

Describe the importance of each measure to a chosen clinical organization and setting.

Using these websites and resources you can choose a hospital, a nursing home, a home health agency, a dialysis center, a health plan, an outpatient clinic or private office; a total population of patient types is also acceptable, but please be specific as to the setting. That is, if you are interested in patients with chronic illness across the continuum of care, you might hone in a particular healthplan, a multispecialty practice setting or a healthcare organization with both inpatient and outpatient/clinic settings. Faculty appointments and academic settings are not permitted for this exercise. For all other settings, consult the instructor for guidance. You do not need actual data from a given organization to complete this assignment.

Relate each measure to patient safety, to the cost of poor quality, and to the overall cost of healthcare.