Clinical Quality Measures in a Post-Pandemic World: Measuring What Matters in Family Medicine (ABFM)

COVID-19 altered the way the American public lived their lives; the way they worked, ate, socialized, traveled, and ultimately received their health care. Family Medicine largely closed its doors to face-to-face preventive and chronic care visits and made a large shift to telephone and online video visits. Ten days after the World Health Organization pronounced that the COVID-19 outbreak was a global pandemic, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma announced that CMS was granting exceptions from reporting requirements, “so the health care delivery system can direct its time and resources toward caring for patients.”15 Suddenly quality reporting requirements were optional, and clinicians who did not submit data would not be penalized, but instead receive neutral payment adjustments. This pause led the ABFM to ask, if current clinical quality measures are not valuable in a pandemic, what does that tell us about what we are measuring?