The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the main private-health-insurance lobbying group, have unveiled new  sets of core measures for quality care.

The Core Quality Measures is a collaboration to design and implement a standard set of metrics across payers so that providers who have been forced to report different quality metrics on a payer-by-payer basis get their administrative burdens reduced as CMS and private payers move to  a common system.

The seven new measure sets include metrics for Accountable Care Organizations/patient-centered medical homes, primary-care cardiology, gastroenterology, HIV/hepatitis C, medical oncology, orthopedics, obstetrics and gynecology.

The announcement is a  step in the transition from the traditional fee-for-service model.  Fierce HealthPayer noted: “While improved quality of care provides an attractive philosophical underpinning for a value-based care model, it’s very difficult for practices to take pragmatic steps toward improving their quality of care without knowing how payers define quality and, more importantly, how they intend to measure it.”