Persons & Family

Quality Measures & You: Persons & Family

Whether you are an individual or a member of a group or association representing the interests of patients and their families, there are many ways in which you can get involved throughout the lifecycle of quality measure development. It is a goal of the CMS Quality Strategy to strengthen your engagement as a partner in your care.

Defining Persons & Family:

The term person as defined here is more than a patient, it is someone who recognizes his or her participation in prevention and wellness. This might be someone who sees their primary care practitioner once a year, who gets home health service, or who uses hospital services. Family representatives are non-healthcare professionals supporting those who receive healthcare and are in need of support to make informed healthcare decisions , such as informal or primary caregivers.

Why You Should Get Involved:

  • You can help identify issues that are important and meaningful from your perspective.
  • You can help identify information that is needed to make informed healthcare decisions.
  • You can help developers and CMS produce high-quality measures that are easily understood, relevant, and useful to consumers.

Ways to Get Involved:

There are many ways to get involved. The first is to take steps to increase your own knowledge and understanding of clinical quality measures: what they are, how they work, how they impact healthcare. That information can all be found on this website for you to explore.

Another way is to join a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) for a specific measure. A TEP is a group of people who care about or have expertise in some type of care, illness, or procedure. These people tell measure developers about their experiences so the developers can design better measures. Your experiences make you an expert, and most TEPs have a goal to include at least one person or family member on the panel to leverage that knowledge and expertise. You can see what panels are forming by visiting the CMS TEP webpage. You can learn more about your role by reviewing Becoming a TEP Member (PDF).

You can also respond in writing during public comment periods for proposed measures. These periods give you an opportunity to share your ideas on whether measures are important and how CMS can use them to improve healthcare.

A fourth way is to provide information through interviews or focus groups. For instance, measure developers often reach out to patient advocacy and patient networking organizations, as well as local providers, to obtain people’s inputs on measures through focus groups or for their support in testing measures to see if they make sense or matter to the people they affect.

Becoming a TEP Member (PDF)

Page Last Modified:
09/06/2023 04:51 PM