CMS launched the comprehensive Meaningful Measures Initiative in 2017, which identifies high priority areas for quality measurement and improvement. The purpose of this initiative is to improve health outcomes for persons, their families, and measured entities, and deliver value by empowering individuals to make informed care decisions, while also reducing burden on measured entities. The Meaningful Measures Initiative also helps to identify and close important gap areas of measures, align measures across the continuum of care and across payors, and spur innovation in new types of measures such as patient-reported measures and digital measures.

As CMS moves forward and evolves the Meaningful Measures Initiative, CMS builds on the strengths of the Initiative while working to create broader, agency-wide actions to modernize and expand quality work. CMS uses five interrelated goals to ensure the use of impactful quality measures to improve health outcomes and to support the delivery of value: 

• using the Meaningful Measures Initiative to streamline quality measurement
• leveraging measures to drive outcome improvement through public reporting and payment programs 
• improving quality measures efficiency by a transition to digital measures and use of advanced data analytics
• empowering individuals to make the best health care choices through person-centered quality measures and public transparency
• leveraging quality measures to promote equity and close gaps in care

By working on these goals across the various components, CMS can work to

• Align measures across CMS, federal programs, and private payers to reduce the number of unique measures, thereby reducing the burden to CMS and measured entities associated with those measures.
• Accelerate ongoing efforts to streamline and modernize programs, reducing burden, and promoting strategically important focus areas.
• Use data and information as essential aspects of a healthy, robust health care infrastructure to allow for payment and management of accountable, value-based care and development of learning health organizations.
• Empower individuals, along with their families and caregivers, through transparency of data and public reporting, so they can make the best-informed decisions about their health care.
• Commit to a person-centered approach in quality measure and value-based incentives programs to ensure that quality and safety measures address health care equity.

It is through these goals and objectives that CMS will be able to use impactful quality measures to improve health outcomes and deliver value by empowering individuals to make informed care decisions while reducing burden to measured entities, which starts with how CMS develops, implements, and evaluates the measures in CMS programs.