Glossary

The PRA mandates that all federal government agencies must obtain approval from the Office of Management and Budget before collection of information that will impose a burden on the public. Measure developers should be familiar with the PRA before implementing any process that involves the collection of new data.

Parameter estimates (also called coefficients) are the change in the response associated with a one-unit change of the predictor, while all other predictors are held constant. Types of parameter estimates include

• Point estimates, which are the single, most likely value of a parameter. For example, the point estimate of population mean (the parameter) is the sample mean (the parameter estimate).
• Confidence intervals, which are a range of values likely to contain the population parameter.

Parametric methods make certain assumptions about a data set; namely, that the data are drawn from a population with a normal distribution. Parametric methods generally have high statistical power. (Tyler, 2017)

PROs are status reports on a patient’s health condition or health behavior that comes directly from the patient, without interpretation of the patient’s response by a clinician or anyone else. This definition reflects the key domains of health-related quality of life (including functional status), symptoms and symptom burden (e.g., pain, fatigue), and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, exercise). (Adapted from the Food and Drug Administration Guidance for Industry PRO Measures: Use in Medical Product Development to Support Labeling Claims)

The CMS CBE defines PROMs in PROs in Performance Measurement as an “instrument, scale, or single-item measure used to assess the PRO concept as perceived by the patient, obtained by directly asking the patient to self-report.” (p. 27)

A patient-reported outcome-based performance measure (PRO-PM) is a performance measure that is based on patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) data aggregated for an accountable health care entity. Measured entities collect the data directly from the patient using the PROM tool, which can be an instrument, scale, or single-item measure.

The population is the total group of people of interest for a quality measure, sometimes called the target/initial population. The measure population is a defined subset appropriate to the measure set not excluded from the individual measure.

A population health quality measure is a broadly applicable indicator that reflects the quality of a group’s overall health and well-being. Topics include access to care, clinical outcomes, coordination of care and community services, health behaviors, preventive care and screening, and utilization of health services.

Predictive validity, also known as empirical validity, is the ability of measure scores to predict scores on some other related valid measure. The degree to which the operationalization can predict (or correlate) with other measures of the same measured construct at some time in the future.

A process measure is a measure that focuses on steps that should be followed to provide good care. There should be a scientific basis for believing that the process, when executed well, will increase the probability of achieving a desired outcome.

A proportion is a score derived by dividing the number of cases that meet a criterion for quality (i.e., the numerator) by the number of eligible cases within a given time frame (i.e., the denominator) where the numerator cases are a subset of the denominator cases (e.g., percentage of eligible women with a mammogram performed in the last year).

The public domain is the “The realm embracing property rights that belong to the community at large, are unprotected by copyright or patent, and are subject to appropriation by anyone” (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, n.d).