Quality Indicators Care Coordination Measures Project

The health care community is struggling to determine how to measure when and if care coordination, considered to be a vital activity, is occurring. The National Quality Forum (NQF) has concluded that adequate measures of care coordination do not currently exist and are urgently needed. Especially pressing is the need to evaluate the effectiveness of care coordination within the primary care patient-centered medical home. The main objectives of the project were to:

• Identify and assess ambulatory care coordination measures and develop an initial list of candidates for evaluation by the AHRQ Quality Indicator development process, with a particular focus on measuring ways that care coordination might prevent emergency room visits and unnecessary hospital readmissions.
• Develop a tool to assess care coordination interventions in studies and demonstration projects in the short term while measurement development activity proceeds.

At the completion of this project, the project team released the Care Coordination Measures Atlas. The Atlas catalogues 61 measures of care coordination, maps them to elements of a care coordination measurement framework, and summarizes key measure properties. The Atlas also includes background information to help orient users towards the field of care coordination, including key definitions, a framework of care coordination activities, broad approaches hypothesized to improve care coordination, and a measure selection guide to assist Atlas users in narrowing the field of available measures to those likely to be most relevant. The Atlas is geared towards three main audiences: 1) evaluators of interventions or demonstration projects that aim to improve care coordination, either as a primary or secondary goal; 2) anyone wishing to evaluate the practice of care coordination or its effects outside the context of interventions or demonstration projects, including quality improvement practitioners; and 3) researchers studying care coordination.

The Care Coordination Measures Atlas developed under this project was updated in 2014 and is available on the AHRQ Web site at http://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/prevention-chronic-care/improve/coordination/atlas2014/index.html.