Groups team up to develop evidence-based measures
Three of the nation’s leading professional organizations in the health care field are teaming up to develop a common set of evidence-based measures for evaluating the appropriateness and effectiveness of pain management for patients suffering from cancer, back pain, and arthritis.
The two-year project, sponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA) in Chicago, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organi-zations (JCAHO), and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), will help physicians, health plans, hospitals, and other health care organizations determine how well they are doing in managing patients’ pain. The initiative represents a major effort to improve the quality and consistency of pain management across the country. The March 2001 Institute of Medicine report "Crossing the Quality Chasm" identified back problems, arthritis, and cancer among 15 therapeutic areas prioritized for improvement in care.
AMA, JCAHO, and NCQA will convene a panel of practicing physicians, pain management experts, and performance measurement experts to define important aspects of pain management that should be measured. The panel then will develop a set of standardized pain management performance measures. The final phase of the project will involve testing of the measures across multiple care delivery settings.
The resulting measure set will be designed to give physicians, health plans, hospitals, and other provider organizations consistent messages about the important aspects of pain management and help to identify opportunities for improving the quality of care provided to these patients. One goal is reducing duplicative data collection activities that can burden a health care system already beleaguered by rising medical costs, says Yank D. Coble Jr., MD, president-elect of the AMA.
"Unrelieved pain has profound physiological and psychological consequences that result in significant costs to patients and families, to the health care system, and to society as a whole," Coble says. "Unfor-tunately, a variety of barriers impede the use of appropriate treatments, causing many patients to suffer needlessly. We have an important opportunity here to provide relief for patients by promoting consistency and quality in the management of pain."
The AMA, JCAHO, and NCQA have worked together to coordinate performance measurement development activities since 1998 and in 2001 unveiled Coordinated Performance Measurement for the Management of Adult Diabetes — a new approach to measuring performance in the delivery of care to diabetes patients.
Purdue Pharma, L.P. is providing unrestricted funds to support development of the pain management measure set. Control and responsibility for the design and content of the measure set rest solely with the AMA, JCAHO, and NCQA. JCAHO will function as the administrative center for the project.
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