Renovating the Commission on Cancer's Quality Measure Portfolio

Nearly 75% of newly diagnosed cancer patients in the United States will receive care from a hospital that is accredited by the Commission on Cancer (CoC). To support hospitals in their quality assurance efforts, the CoC maintains a portfolio of quality measures to give hospitals compliance data with select best practices for cancer care. As the CoC quality measures have evolved over recent years, many clinicians may lack awareness of the intent and content of the measure portfolio, as well as the mechanism by which new measures originate.

The CoC quality measures are based on data that hospitals submit to the National Cancer Database, allowing the CoC to track compliance with a subset of consensus best practices. Each year, new measures are designed by diverse teams of specialists in the different treatment modalities for the tumor types covered by the portfolio. These proposed measures are then subjected to a range of vetting, refinement, and prioritization steps before being voted into the portfolio by the Quality Assurance and Data Committee of the CoC. Over the past 4 years, the CoC has worked to renovate not only the portfolio but also the process used to create and launch new measures, revise existing measures, and retire obsolete measures.

In the following overview, we outline the current measure process, highlight important changes to the portfolio, and share opportunities to further increase the impact.