DataDerm: Improving trends in performance measurement

Medicare's legacy quality reporting programs were consolidated into the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) in 2015.

The DataDerm registry of the American Academy of Dermatology was examined to understand the potential for and subsequent rate of improvement across 23 performance measures.

We examined the level of performance across 23 performance measures with at least 20 clinicians reporting on at least 50 patients' experience. We calculated the following values: the aggregate performance rate for each measure and the overall aggregate performance rate.

The aggregate performance rate for each measure ranged from 20.4% for AAD 1 (Psoriasis: Assessment of Disease Activity), to 99.9% for measure ACMS 1 (Avoidance of Opioid Prescriptions for Reconstruction After Skin Resection). Three of 23 measures had an aggregate performance over 95%. The overall aggregate performance rate across all 23 measures was 81.2%, indicating an aggregate potential for improvement of 18.8% across the 23 measures. Nine performance measures reported across the first five years of DataDerm's existence were tracked through time to understand trends in performance through time. The performance across the nine performance measures meeting the inclusion criteria consistently improved in the initial years (2016 through 2018) of DataDerm participation and showed some variation in 2019 and 2020.

These data provide evidence that the very act of participation in a multi-institutional registry and tracking compliance with performance measures can lead to improvements in compliance with the performance measures and therefore improvements in quality of care.