DOH Quality Committee Discusses DSRIP, Innovation Plan, Provider Profiles

The Department of Health’s (DOH) Quality Advisory Committee met on May 16 in New York City to discuss the committee’s role in the Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program, the State Health Innovation Plan, updated online provider profiles and other initiatives.

LeadingAge New York is a member of the committee, which also includes hospital, managed care plan and consumer representatives. The committee’s current charge is to provide DOH with expertise in various sectors of health care quality, assist on proposed quality improvement goals and provide guidance on measuring and reporting quality information to the public.

The Quality Advisory Committee will serve as an advisory group for DSRIP, offering expertise in health care quality measures, clinical measurement and clinical data used in performance improvement initiatives. Specifically, the committee will provide feedback to the State on the following DSRIP elements: (1) development of attribution models; (2) selection of metrics; and (3) selection of the high performance target goals including the behavioral health high performance avoidable hospitalization threshold for bonus payment purposes.

The goal of the State Health Innovation Plan (SHIP) is to identify and stimulate the spread of promising innovations in health care delivery and finance that result in optimal health outcomes for all New Yorkers. The SHIP is intended to pave the way for the State to support innovations in health care delivery, to implement strategies to spread those innovations more broadly throughout New York and serve as the basis for anticipated federal funding to support the proposed initiatives.

DOH staff emphasized the need to align DSRIP activities, managed care initiatives (both of which are Medicaid focused), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) quality measures and the SHIP (which is not limited to Medicaid), while acknowledging problems with differing quality measures, definitions and improvement activities. Both DSRIP and SHIP focus on reducing avoidable hospital use, transforming payment, improving population health and improving health information exchange.

DOH staff discussed the State’s plans to provide updated online NYS Health Profiles. The hospital profile will be released first, with updates to the nursing home, home health and physician profiles currently under development and managed care profiles to follow. Working with IPRO, the Department’s goal is to finalize the new nursing home and home health agency profiles sometime this summer. The Committee discussed the age of the data/measures that will appear on these profiles, how often they will be updated, the need to develop user guides, how to publicly launch the new profiles and to obtain feedback from consumers, providers and payers.

The United Hospital Fund’s Quality Institute and the New York State Partnership for Patients – an initiative to reduce hospital-acquired infections by 40 percent and preventable readmissions by 20 percent – were also discussed.

Contact: Dan Heim, dheim@leadingageny.org, 518-867-8866