Key points
- CDC's 5-year Quality Measure Roadmap establishes a unified vision, approach, and priorities for public health-focused quality measures in health care.
- CDC is committed to advancing health care quality in partnership with providers, public health stakeholders, and federal partners.
- Quality measures in health care improve public health and are a foundational area of collaboration for CDC.
Shared Public Health and Health Care Mission
Advancing health care quality is a foundational area of collaboration between public health and health care to build a resilient health ecosystem that promotes quality outcomes for all, improves the patient experience, reduces costs, and decreases provider burden.
Quality measures are an important tool for driving better health outcomes. They help health care and public health identify, prioritize, and coordinate quality improvement efforts; they also provide a mechanism for jointly monitoring progress and sharing accountability.
CDC's Quality Measure Roadmap
CDC has a long history of working with partners to support quality measure development, implementation, and adoption. We have an opportunity to extend and deepen our impact and these partnerships with a defined set of focused quality priorities. By working across CDC and aligning with partners, we have identified the following 11 quality measure concepts as near-term opportunities for impact.
These 11 quality measure concepts are dynamic, not static, and will expand and evolve over time in alignment with agency and partner priorities.
Supporting Young Families
CDC prioritizes upstream prevention so that children and families have what they need to thrive. These focus areas build upon CDC’s work to help children and their families get the strongest start possible, including efforts in maternal and child health, prevention of injury and chronic disease, early childhood development, and preventing and addressing infectious diseases in childhood.
Antibiotic Stewardship
Focus: Antibiotic Utilization for Respiratory Conditions
Goal: Combat antimicrobial resistance by monitoring antibiotic use to ensure these medications are being prescribed correctly
CDC is committed to reducing infections caused by antibiotic-resistant germs.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Antimicrobial Resistance | CDC.
Hypertension Management in Pregnancy
Focus: Hypertension Management in Pregnancy
Goal: Reduce adverse maternal outcomes
CDC is committed to improving care coordination for hypertensive disorders in pregnancy to reduce common pregnancy complications and pregnancy-related death in the United States.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Hypertension Management Program | CDC.
Social Determinants of Health
Focus: Social Determinants of Health/Health Related Social Needs Screening and Intervention
Goal: Improve health equity and well-being
CDC works to understand social determinants of health that negatively affect patients' health and well-being so that appropriate resources can be accessed to address them.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) | About CDC | CDC
Tobacco Use
Focus: Tobacco Use Screening & Treatment
Goal: Reduce tobacco-associated preventable disease
CDC is committed to reducing tobacco use by increasing access to and use of smoking cessation services.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Tobacco | CDC.
Improving Mental Health & Combatting the Overdose Crisis
CDC is committed to addressing and getting upstream of the mental health and overdose crises. These focus areas build upon CDC's critical behavioral health surveillance and programmatic prevention activities.
Support Behavioral Health
Focus: Behavioral Health Patient Reported Outcomes
Goal: Focus on outcomes that engage patients and their families as partners in their care journey
CDC is committed to improving behavioral health outcomes by advancing a coordinated public health approach to addressing shared risk and protective factors, improving conditions where we live, work, learn, and play.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Behavioral Health | CDC.
Hepatitis C Virus (HCV)
Focus: Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) Screening and Treatment Initiation
Goal: Reduce preventable mortality
CDC is committed to slowing and eliminating the spread of hepatitis C by working with health care providers, health departments and community-based organizations to improve access to screening, treatment, and care services.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Hepatitis C | CDC.
Preventing Opioid Overdose
Focus: Initiation of and Linkage to Evidence-Based Treatment after Acute Care Visit for Opioid Use Disorder
Goal: Reduce overdose deaths
CDC is committed to preventing overdoses and opioid use-related harms by increasing access to evidence-based strategies for prevention and linkage to care for opioid use disorder treatment services.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Overdose Prevention | Overdose Prevention | CDC.
Readiness & Response
CDC brings innovative science to detect and respond to emerging health threats. These focus areas build upon CDC's historic and foundational efforts, including the Vaccines for Children and state immunization programs and domestic and global work on epidemic-prone diseases.
Adult Immunization
Focus: Adult Immunization Status
Goal: Reduce vaccine-preventable disease
CDC is committed to protecting people and communities from vaccine-preventable diseases by equitably increasing access, confidence, and demand for vaccines.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Adult Immunization | CDC.
Prenatal Immunization
Focus: Prenatal Immunization Status
Goal: Protect mothers and babies from vaccine-preventable diseases
CDC is committed to educating those who may become or who are pregnant about being vaccinated against vaccine-preventable diseases, such as: whooping cough, flu, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Pregnancy & Vaccines | CDC.
Patient Safety
CDC has a long history of working to stop the spread of infections through guidance to health care providers and hospital facilities that help enable the collection and use of health care surveillance data to combat the spread of infections. These focus areas build upon those historical efforts to help prevent infection spread and promote control practices essential to providing safe and high-quality patient care.
Hospital Onset Bacteremia
Focus: Hospital Onset Bacteremia
Goal: Prevent health care-associated infections
CDC is committed to preventing health care-associated infections and making health care safer for everyone.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Prevention and Control Practices | CDC.
Sepsis Early Detection
Focus: Sepsis
Goal: Increase survival rates via early detection and management
CDC is committed to early detection and management of sepsis before an infection a person already has triggers a chain-reaction throughout your body.
To learn more about what CDC is doing, please visit Sepsis | CDC.
Implementing CDC’s Quality Measure Roadmap
CDC leadership regarding care quality and quality measurement—including the 11 initial quality measure concepts outlined in its Quality Measure Roadmap—rests on three strategic pillars:
Partnership
Establish shared accountability and collaborative directive action
CDC will work closely with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), other federal partners, and public and private stakeholders to prioritize "meaningful measures" and align our work with initiatives like the Universal Foundation and Core Quality Measures Collaborative. Through these partnerships, we can focus provider attention, reduce burden, better identify disparities in care, and improve comparability across populations.
Creating a Strong Foundation
Modernize and advance interoperable systems
Advancing the seamless exchange of data across public health and health care is a core tenet of CDC's vision for public health data and its Public Health Data Strategy, as well as CMS's Quality Strategy. Through its partnerships with the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP), CMS, and other key stakeholders, CDC is championing the standards and technology needed for nationwide, interoperable exchange of data for public health action—including actions focused on improving care quality and health outcomes for all. For example, CDC's National Health care Safety Network (NHSN) is developing fully electronic and, where feasible, fully automated measures for patient safety, quality reporting, and public health preparedness and response.
Innovation in Action
New ways to think about measuring quality
CDC will partner with CMS and other public and private stakeholders to advance the science of quality measures, particularly in areas of emerging population health concern. As technology standards continue to improve, the CDC will work with partners to develop and refine better ways to measure outcomes and visualize high quality care among specific populations. Innovative measurement and dashboard approaches will help policymakers understand the drivers behind outcomes and then address those drivers.