Measurement Approach

WCHQ publicly reports a broad collection of health care performance measures that evaluate ambulatory quality.

These measures encompass health conditions related to mental health, diabetes, heart care, cancer screenings, immunizations and healthy child development. Our measures are regularly reviewed by clinicians to ensure they represent the current best practices, are evidence-based and clinically proven to get the best results for the most patients.

Measures are publicly reported at WCHQ.org.

WCHQ member organizations — which include health systems, medical and dental groups  — voluntarily collect and report data related to the services that they provide for all patients. WCHQ then applies measure definitions to assess performance on each of these measures at the health system and clinic level. WCHQ then publishes the results so health care providers, purchasers and consumers can compare the performance of member organizations.

This method of publicly reporting quality data has been shown to catalyze improvement, as well as encourage greater efficiency and best practice sharing among health care providers.

WCHQ's Unique Approach: All Patients, All Payers

Many other health care reporting organizations relyexclusively on administrative claims from commercial insurers to create theirperformance measures. Such claims-based reports exclude Medicare, Medicaid andself-pay patients, which account for nearly 50 percent of clinical practice.

Physicians, data analysts and improvement specialists from the WCHQ membership have developed ambulatory care specifications that capture all patients and all payers. By uniting claims, clinical and patient data, WCHQ tracks each provider's entire practice and highlights where they are performing strongly as well as where opportunities for improvement exist. This comprehensive approach enables WCHQ to create a sophisticated measure set that evaluates both clinical processes and outcomes, such as A1c and blood pressure control.

Through an innovative mapping process, WCHQ is able to synthesize data from disparate electronic health records (EHR) and draw comparisons between systems in an apples-to-apples manner, regardless of the EHR system. This allows WCHQ to engage any health system in quality improvement and for health system-specific coding to be included in the measurement.