CMS’s goal is to fill critical gaps in measurement that align with and support the Meaningful Measures Initiative, which identifies high priority areas for quality measurement. Its purpose is to improve outcomes for persons, their families, and measured entities while also reducing burden and moving payment toward value through focusing everyone’s efforts on the same quality areas. The Meaningful Measures Initiative also helps to identify and close important measure gap areas, align measures across the continuum of care and across measured entities, and spur measure innovation.

As a public call for measures, the pre-rulemaking process helps to ensure the quality measures in CMS programs are patient-centered and meaningful to persons and measured entities, and promote CMS’s quality goals. CMS prioritizes patient-reported outcome-based performance measures (PRO-PMs) and other measures using patient-generated data in CMS programs. For additional information about CMS priorities, see the 2024 Measures Under Consideration List Program-Specific Measure Needs and Priorities for all programs involved in the pre-rulemaking process and the CMS Quality Measure Development Plan for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System.

Quality programs must balance competing goals of establishing parsimonious sets of measures, while including sufficient measures to facilitate multi-specialty participation. CMS aligns measures across programs whenever possible, and, when choosing measures for new programs, looks first to measures currently in existing programs. For more information about measures currently in CMS programs, explore the CMS Measures Inventory Tool.

Also, CMS has developed the Quality Measure Index (QMI), an internal tool, to systematically assess the relative value of quality measures in achieving CMS strategic objectives. The intent of the QMI is to provide a repeatable and consistent assessment of measures and enhance the decision-making processes currently used by CMS for measure selection, implementation, and continued use in quality reporting programs. CMS has made modifications or additions to requested measure information submitted during the candidate measure submission process to standardize and determine the availability of the information required for the QMI.