Validation of New Care Coordination Quality Measures for Children with Medical Complexity.

Objectives: To validate new caregiver-reported quality measures assessing care coordination services for children with medical complexity (CMC).

Methods: A cross-sectional analysis of the associations between 20 newly developed Family Experiences with Coordination of Care (FECC) quality measures and 3 validation measures among 1209 caregivers who responded to a telephone or mailed survey from August to November 2013 in Minnesota and Washington. Validation measures included an access composite, a provider rating item, and a care coordination outcome measure, all derived from Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey items.

Risk of Hepatitis B Virus Reactivation Among Patients Treated With Ledipasvir-Sofosbuvir for Hepatitis C Virus Infection.

Background: Direct acting antiviral (DAA) agents are the standard of care for treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV)-infected individuals. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) reactivation during HCV treatment has been reported, the incidence and clinical outcome remains unclear. The aim of our study is to examine the risk of HBV reactivation in actively infected or previously exposed patients during or after HCV treatment with DAAs.

Development and Implementation of the Family Experiences With Coordination of Care Survey Quality Measures.

Objective: Ensuring high-quality care coordination for children with medical complexity (CMC) could yield significant health and economic benefits because they account for one-third of pediatric health care expenditures. The objective of this study was to develop and field test the Family Experiences with Coordination of Care (FECC) survey, which facilitates assessment of 20 new caregiver-reported quality measures for CMC.

Methods: We identified caregivers of Medicaid-insured CMC aged 0 to 17 years in Minnesota and Washington state, categorized by the Pediatric Medical Complexity Algorithm as having complex chronic disease.

Strategies For Assessing Delivery System Innovations.

Driven by evidence of continuing gaps in health care quality and efficiency and inspired by the emergence of new value-based payment models, both large and small health care organizations are developing and deploying a wide range of care delivery innovations. But how can decision makers in these organizations determine if the innovations really improve service delivery, patient experience, clinical outcomes, or costs? Organization leaders need appropriate, timely evidence to inform their decision making. In this article we describe a range of approaches to evaluating innovations and pose key questions about the validity of the results.

Development and Testing of the ediatric espiratory llness asurement ystem (PRIMES) Quality Indicators.

Objectives: To develop and test quality indicators for assessing care in pediatric hospital settings for common respiratory illnesses.

Patients: A sample of 2796 children discharged from the emergency department or inpatient setting at 1 of the 3 participating hospitals with a primary diagnosis of asthma, bronchiolitis, croup, or community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2011.

Setting: Three tertiary care children's hospitals in the United States.

Quality Measures to Assess Care Transitions for Hospitalized Children.

Background: Transitions between sites of care are inherent to all hospitalizations, yet we lack pediatric-specific transitions-of-care quality measures. We describe the development and validation of new transitions-of-care quality measures obtained from medical record data.

Methods: After an evidence review, a multistakeholder panel prioritized quality measures by using the RAND/University of California, Los Angeles modified Delphi method.

Lower Patient Ratings of Physician Communication Are Associated With Unmet Need for Symptom Management in Patients With Lung and Colorectal Cancer.

Purpose: Little is known about factors associated with unmet needs for symptom management in patients with cancer.

Methods: Patients with a new diagnosis of lung and colorectal cancer from the diverse nationally representative Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance cohort completed a survey approximately 5 months after diagnosis (N = 5,422). We estimated the prevalence of unmet need for symptom management, defined as patients who report that they wanted help for at least one common symptom (pain, fatigue, depression, nausea/vomiting, cough, dyspnea, diarrhea) during the 4 weeks before the survey but did not receive it.

The Comparison of Matching Methods Using Different Measures of Balance: Benefits and Risks Exemplified within a Study to Evaluate the Effects of German Disease Management Programs on Long-Term Outcomes of Patients with Type 2 Diabetes.

Objective: To present a case study on how to compare various matching methods applying different measures of balance and to point out some pitfalls involved in relying on such measures.

Data Sources: Administrative claims data from a German statutory health insurance fund covering the years 2004-2008.

Study Design: We applied three different covariance balance diagnostics to a choice of 12 different matching methods used to evaluate the effectiveness of the German disease management program for type 2 diabetes (DMPDM2).

Estimating causal effects for multivalued treatments: a comparison of approaches.

Interventions with multivalued treatments are common in medical and health research, such as when comparing the efficacy of competing drugs or interventions, or comparing between various doses of a particular drug. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the development of multivalued treatment effect estimators using observational data. In this paper, we compare the performance of commonly used regression-based methods that estimate multivalued treatment effects based on the unconfoundedness assumption.

Building Data Infrastructure to Evaluate and Improve Quality: PCORnet.

The goal of PCORnet is to create a community of research that includes patients, clinicians, and health care delivery systems to improve the nation's ability to conduct comparative-effectiveness research.

Treatment patterns for ductal carcinoma in situ from 2000-2010 across six integrated health plans.

Considerable debate exists about the optimal treatment of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Using electronic data sources, we examined first course treatment patterns among women aged 18 years and older diagnosed with DCIS between 2000-2010 from six Kaiser Permanente (KP) regions. We calculated the proportion of patients receiving breast conserving surgery (BCS), BCS plus radiation therapy, unilateral mastectomy, bilateral mastectomy, and hormone therapy.

Using Medicaid and CHIP claims data to support pediatric quality measurement: lessons from 3 centers of excellence in measure development.

Objective: We sought to explore the claims data-related issues relevant to quality measure development for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), illustrating the challenges encountered and solutions developed around 3 distinct performance measure topics: care coordination for children with complex needs, quality of care for high-prevalence conditions, and hospital readmissions.

Methods: Each of 3 centers of excellence presents an example that illustrates the challenges of using claims data for quality measurement.

Results: Our Centers of Excellence in pediatric quality measurement used innovative methods to develop algorithms that use Medicaid claims data to identify children with complex needs; overcome some shortcomings of existing data for measuring quality of care for common conditions such as otitis media; and identify readmissions after hospitalizations for lower respiratory infections.

Developing a data infrastructure for a learning health system: the PORTAL network.

The Kaiser Permanente & Strategic Partners Patient Outcomes Research To Advance Learning (PORTAL) network engages four healthcare delivery systems (Kaiser Permanente, Group Health Cooperative, HealthPartners, and Denver Health) and their affiliated research centers to create a new national network infrastructure that builds on existing relationships among these institutions. PORTAL is enhancing its current capabilities by expanding the scope of the common data model, paying particular attention to incorporating patient-reported data more systematically, implementing new multi-site data governance procedures, and integrating the PCORnet PopMedNet platform across our research centers. PORTAL is partnering with clinical research and patient experts to create cohorts of patients with a common diagnosis (colorectal cancer), a rare diagnosis (adolescents and adults with severe congenital heart disease), and adults who are overweight or obese, including those with pre-diabetes or diabetes, to conduct large-scale observational comparative effectiveness research and pragmatic clinical trials across diverse clinical care settings.

Comparative effectiveness topics from a large, integrated delivery system.

Objective: To identify high-priority comparative effectiveness questions directly relevant to care delivery in a large, US integrated health care system.

Methods: In 2010, a total of 792 clinical and operational leaders in Kaiser Permanente were sent an electronic survey requesting nominations of comparative effectiveness research questions; most recipients (83%) had direct clinical roles. Nominated questions were divided into 18 surveys of related topics that included 9 to 23 questions for prioritization.