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CMS chief medical officer says equity, quality go together

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Lee Fleisher, M.D., chief medical officer for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, discusses CMS’s drive for, in the words of NEJM catalyst, “health-care delivery improvement in quality, safety, high reliability, and equity, and the various levers of its quality measurement agenda.”

Indeed, he says, if we don’t have equity, we don’t have quality.

He tells NEJM: “What we’ve learned from the pandemic is a resilient system. At the lowest, at the baseline level, are our conditions of participation, those minimum standards that we push out to ensure that all health care providers who are covered by Medicare or certified provide that care. We need to rethink how they should include equity, just like we included safety 2 decades ago, that it’s important that governance look at equity. We’ve asked a number of questions in our request for proposals, for information, about how they should change. We then have three levers to improve quality to get to that highest level. One is the payment models, another is the quality improvement activities, but what is really important are those quality measures.”

To read his discussion with Dr. Thomas Lee in NEJM catalyst, please hit this link.

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