National Quality Measures for Child Mental Health Care: Background, Progress, and Next Steps

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To review recent health policies related to measuring child health care quality, the selection processes of national child health quality measures, the nationally recommended quality measures for child mental health care and their evidence strength, the progress made toward developing new measures, and early lessons learned from these national efforts.METHODS: Methods used included description of the selection process of child health care quality measures from 2 independent national initiatives, the recommended quality measures for child mental health care, and the strength of scientific evidence supporting them. RESULTS:Of the child health quality measures recommended or endorsed during these national initiatives, only 9 unique measures were related to child mental health. CONCLUSIONS:The development of new child mental health quality measures poses methodologic challenges that will require a paradigm shift to align research with its accelerated pace. Pediatrics 2013;131: S38-S49 AUTHORS:

Development and Validation of the Pediatric Medical Complexity Algorithm (PMCA) Version 2.0

“…2,3 One aspect of this work was to identify and/or develop a valid methodology to assess disparities in care according to the level of medical complexity for children with special health care needs. 4 As the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is implemented, Medicaid and the health care system increasingly need strategies to allocate resources; accurate identification of children who are most likely to benefit from care coordination and other resources is critical.…”

Pediatric Medical Complexity Algorithm: A New Method to Stratify Children by Medical Complexity

“…The third pattern involved children with mental health conditions or developmental delay, conditions that are commonly undercoded in claims data. 3,20 Children determined to have NC-CD according to medical record review who were misclassified by PMCA as C-CD in both hospital and Medicaid The n values are the number of children from the gold standard sample included in the designated category. Data are given as % (95% confidence interval).…”

“…2,3 The Center of Excellence on Quality of Care Measures for Children with Complex Needs (COE4CCN) was charged with identifying and/or developing a valid method to assess disparities in care according to level of medical complexity for children with special health care needs.…”

The Expanding Relevance of Routinely Collected Outcome Data for Mental Health Care Decision Making

“…Within the broad context of health care reform, a number of federal and non-federal ''quality improvement'' initiatives that place ROM and reporting at the center are already underway (IOM 2007;Zima et al 2013). For example, the Medicare physician quality reporting system (PQRS) now penalizes providers with reduced reimbursement rates if data are not reported on designated service measures.…”