Kidney Care Partners Announces Major Initiative to Develop Quality Metrics that Assess Dialysis Provider Performance

WASHINGTON, March 24, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On the heels of the release of A Strategic Blueprint for Advancing Kidney Care Quality, Kidney Care Partners (KCP) today announced a major quality initiative with formation of the Kidney Care Quality Alliance (KCQA), an organization of community leaders who will develop facility-level quality performance measures for dialysis providers.

KCP, the organization funding the effort, is a broad-based coalition of patient advocates, dialysis professionals, care providers, researchers and manufacturers.  KCQA plans to develop approximately two new quality measures this year. 

In 2005, KCP launched a similar effort that led to the development of quality measures eventually endorsed by the National Quality Forum. In 2011-12, two of these measures were consolidated and re-endorsed as a single NQF-endorsed vascular access measure along with an influenza immunization measure. 

Co-chairing the new KCQA initiative are Dr. Edward Jones, a practicing nephrologist who serves as Chair of KCP, and Dr. Allen Nissenson, Chief Medical Officer of DaVita HealthCare Partners and Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles.  A 10-member Steering Committee will guide the initiative.

"KCP's Blueprint was a multi-stakeholder, consensus document that provided a   strategic roadmap to improve quality," said Dr. Jones. "Our next step toward significantly improving kidney care quality will be a collaborative initiative to develop facility-level performance measures."

Dr. Allen Nissenson added, "We look forward to working with representatives of the entire kidney community in this new and very important initiative."

While formed by KCP, the KCQA will be open to all national and regional organizations involved in kidney care.  

KCP's Strategic Blueprint outlined several key quality areas that will serve as the starting point for KCQA to prioritize measurement areas:

• Care Coordination
• Disease Management
• Infrastructure
• Palliative & End-of-Life Care
• Patient Engagement & Education
• Patient Satisfaction & Patient Experience With Care
• Pediatric-Specific Issues
• Quality of Life
• Safety

KCQA expects to submit the newly developed measures to NQF for endorsement.

"CMS has always expressed a desire to work with community stakeholders in the agency's own measure development, and we commend them for that." said Dr. Jones.  "We share the agency's desire to continue to raise the quality bar, and we look forward to working collaboratively with agency officials on new measure development through the KCQA," he added. 

SOURCE Kidney Care Partners