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Page Content Updated:  02/2012

Hospital IQR Overview

The Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (Hospital IQR) program was developed as a result of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) of 2003. Section 5001(a) of Pub. 109-171 of the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005 provided new requirements for the Hospital IQR program, which built on the voluntary Hospital Quality Initiative.

This program is intended to provide consumers with quality of care information to make more informed decisions about healthcare options. It is also intended to encourage hospitals and clinicians to improve the quality of inpatient care provided to all patients. The hospital quality of care information gathered through the program is available to consumers on the Hospital Compare website.

The Hospital IQR program requires "sub-section (d)" hospitals to submit data for specific quality measures for health conditions common among people with Medicare, and which typically result in hospitalization. More…

National Hospital Inpatient Quality Measures Specifications Manual

The Specifications Manual for National Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Measures is the result of the collaborative efforts of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and The Joint Commission to publish a uniform set of national hospital quality measures.
Over time, it will be necessary to present more than one version of the manual on this Web page so that a specific data collection time period (i.e., based on hospital discharge dates) can be associated with the applicable manual. More…

Inpatient Data Collection & CART for Hospitals

The CMS Abstraction & Reporting Tool (CART), is a powerful application for the collection and analysis of quality improvement data. Through data collection, retrospective analyses and real-time reporting, CART enables hospitals to comprehensively evaluate and manage quality improvement efforts. Whether a hospital is seeking Medicare certification and/or Joint Commission accreditation, or undertaking its own quality improvement initiatives, CART is ideal for the data collection and analyses that are essential to the success of all quality improvement efforts. More…

Data Submission for Hospitals

Hospitals participating in Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) quality improvement initiatives must submit specified data in the prescribed format (see Technical Specifications) to the QIO Clinical Warehouse, the national data repository for private healthcare data. Data must be submitted by the transmission deadlines established CMS. More…

Data Validation Overview for Hospitals

The validation review is conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Clinical Data Abstraction Center (CDAC) for selected hospitals participating in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (Hospital IQR) Program. CMS verifies, on a quarterly basis, that hospital abstracted data submitted to the QIO Clinical Warehouse is consistent and reproducible. More…

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Benchmarks of Care

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) calculates quarterly benchmarks of care, based on hospital data submitted to its clinical data warehouses. These benchmarks were developed using the Achievable Benchmarks of Care™ (ABC) methodology and are based on the reported performance of the top facilities. Developed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), this methodology identifies benchmark care levels achieved by "best-in-class" providers. They identify superior performance and encourage performance improvement. More…