American College of Physicians supports Core Quality Measures Collaborative agreement

Philadelphia, February 16, 2016 – The American College of Physicians (ACP) supports the Core Quality Measures Collaborative agreement on core measure sets for select areas of practice – Accountable Care Organizations (ACO)/Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMH)/Primary Care, Cardiology, Gastroenterology, and HIV/Hepatitis C.

“Clinicians, consumers, employers, and public and private payers benefit from making quality measurement more useful and meaningful,” said ACP President Wayne J. Riley, MD, MPH, MBA, MACP. “This collaborative effort is a major step forward to reduce variability in measure selection, specifications, and implementation. It sets a model for future work on performance measurement alignment in these and other areas.”

With input and participation from ACP and other professional organizations, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), health plans, the National Quality Forum, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, in addition to consumers and employers, the Collaborative has been working to create consistency and alignment across measures being used by both public and private payers.

The Collaborative seeks to promote measures that are evidence-based and generate valuable information for quality improvement, decision-making, and value-based payment and purchasing. The core measure sets are designed to be meaningful to patients and consumers and to physicians, while maintaining parsimony and reducing the collection burden and cost.

About the American College of Physicians
The American College of Physicians is the largest medical specialty organization and the second-largest physician group in the United States. ACP members include 143,000 internal medicine physicians (internists), related subspecialists, and medical students. Internal medicine physicians are specialists who apply scientific knowledge and clinical expertise to the diagnosis, treatment, and compassionate care of adults across the spectrum from health to complex illness. Follow ACP on Twitter and Facebook.