50th Anniversary Q&A with CMS’ Chief Medical Officer

Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, is the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Acting Principal Deputy Administrator and Deputy Administrator for Innovation and Quality, and CMS Chief Medical Officer.

Q. CMS is widely perceived as a national leader in improving health care quality. What have been some of the agency’s most significant and recent accomplishments in the area of health quality improvement?
A. Many of those accomplishments came about via the QIO Program. I’ll call out a few specifically. First, the QIN-QIO work with nursing homes that has led to improvements in areas like pressure ulcers, restraint usage and antipsychotic drug usage. Second, the QIN-QIOs’ work in reducing unnecessary admissions and readmissions to hospitals. Third, the QIN-QIOs’ and Partnership for Patients’ activities in the area of patient safety. In the last three years, we experienced a 17 percent reduction in harm, corresponding to about 50,000 lives saved, 1.3 million unnecessary patient harms avoided and $12 billion in cost savings. Finally, our 2015 Impact Assessment of Quality Measures Report showed that 95 percent of 119 publicly reported performance rates across seven quality reporting programs improved from 2006 to 2012. QIN-QIOs helped support many of these quality measures.

Read all Q & A’s from QIO News.