04 May Updated CMS National Quality Strategy to Focus More on Digital Data

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) National Quality Strategy focuses on promoting quality outcomes, safety, equity, and accessibility for all individuals, especially those in underserved communities.

Originally launched a year ago, CMS officials recently discussed updates to the National Quality Strategy at the 2023 CMS Quality Conference. These updates include increasing the percentage of digital measures used in CMS quality programs, as well as leveraging the FHIR data standard.

In particular, CMS is placing a much more significant priority on digital data. One CMS official discussed a core focus on interoperability and data-driven healthcare.

CMS wants to use all-payer data for continuous improvement in person-centered care. This includes the increased alignment across quality reporting and value-based payment programs. The goal is to have a universal set of quality measures that address high-priority clinical areas and support services around maternal health, behavioral health, equity and safety.

For health payers, these changes point to the need for key investments in data quality enhancement and interoperability solutions – to provide easy access to actionable, clean and validated clinical data.

Fortunately, the IMAT Flexible Payer Solution allows health payers to gain optimal results from their data, while also removing any challenges with meeting emerging standards around the CMS National Quality Strategy.

In terms of interoperability, the IMAT Flexible Payer Solution supports new FHIR capabilities by ingesting all patient data with full conversion into a FHIR-based messages. This removes the burden from payers to fund and implement the required interoperability, which can be very costly and strain internal IT resources.

The IMAT platform also recently achieved its recertification of its Validated Data Stream designation in the NCQA Data Aggregator Validation (DAV) program. Clinical Data Integration (CDI) is the foundation of the IMAT Flexible Payer Solution offering, which has also been validated by Gartner as a key vendor who can help payers achieve CDI at scale.

Interested in learning more about how IMAT Solutions can help you get prepared for upcoming changes to the CMS National Quality Strategy?

Click here to schedule a 20-minute demo of the IMAT Flexible Payer Solution offering with our expert clinical data integration team that boasts a combined experience of over 40 years.