CMS Sematrix: A Tool to Aid the Development of Clinical Quality Measures (CQMs)
This tool addresses the time-consuming and costly process of literature review for healthcare quality improvement, specifically aiding the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but it is incremental as it applies existing automated techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of efficiently identifying relevant clinical and health services literature for developing and maintaining clinical quality measures (CQMs) by introducing CMS Sematrix, an automated tool that reduces labor hours by roughly 818 hours and saves about $122,000 per monthly scan compared to traditional methods.
As part of the effort to improve quality and to reduce national healthcare costs, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are responsible for creating and maintaining an array of clinical quality measures (CQMs) for assessing healthcare structure, process, outcome, and patient experience across various conditions, clinical specialties, and settings. The development and maintenance of CQMs involves substantial and ongoing evaluation of the evidence on the measure's properties: importance, reliability, validity, feasibility, and usability. As such, CMS conducts monthly environmental scans of the published clinical and health service literature. Conducting time consuming, exhaustive evaluations of the ever-changing healthcare literature presents one of the largest challenges to an evidence-based approach to healthcare quality improvement. Thus, it is imperative to leverage automated techniques to aid CMS in the identification of clinical and health services literature relevant to CQMs. Additionally, the estimated labor hours and related cost savings of using CMS Sematrix compared to a traditional literature review are roughly 818 hours and 122,000 dollars for a single monthly environmental scan.