Quality Measures

Guidelines (Recommended Care) > Measures (Ideal Outcomes) > Patient Visit (Actual Outcomes) > Axon Registry (Data Overtime Informs Guidelines)

Improve the care of your patients by using the AAN's quality measurement sets, reporting initiatives, and other resources.

Browse Measures By Topic

Inpatient and Emergency Care

Epilepsy and Seizures

Other Neurologic Conditions

Stroke and Vascular Neurology

How To Use a Measure

Learn how quality measures are integrated into public and private payer programs and how you can use this data to drive improvement in practice. Additional quality improvement resources are available.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How do measures differ from guidelines?
A. Quality measures are math equations to help understand how often health care services are consistent with current medical knowledge. Clinical Practice Guidelines are documents that include recommendations intended to optimize patient care that are based on an evidence-based systematic review. Guideline recommendations form the denominator and numerator statements of quality measures.

Q. Why are there so many measures in a set, and do I have to do them all?
A. The measurement sets include multiple measures with strong evidence or guideline statements supporting best practices and known treatment gaps. Providers are encouraged to pick 1-2 measures most meaningful to their patient populations and start measuring there. This measure data can form a benchmark and be used to drive quality improvement in practice. There is no mandate to gather data for all measures.

Q. Am I required to use quality measures as part of my patient visit?
A.There is no requirement, but for individual providers participating in CMS' Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) there is a required quality component. As part of MIPS' program requirements, eligible providers must submit quality measure data to satisfy reporting requirements to be eligible for an incentive (bonus) payment.

Q. Are there other measures for neurology that the AAN did not develop?
A.Yes. The National Quality Measures Clearinghouse (NQMC) is a repository with hundreds of measures that are searchable by topic, specialty, or measure developer. There are many cross-cutting measures (depression screening, tobacco cessation) and neurology-specific measures (headache, imaging, oncology) that neurologists may find useful. The National Quality Forum maintains a database of measures it has endorsed.

Q. What is Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) data?

A. Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) measures or PROM use an instrument or scale to directly assess any report of a patient’s health
condition directly from that patient, without interpretation of the patient’s symptoms, feelings, or concerns by anyone else. Examples include the PHQ-9, PROMIS, and HIT-6. PRO-Performance Measures (PRO-PM) are performance measures based on PROM. An example is Percentage of patients with diagnosis of major depression or dysthymia with an initial PHQ-9 score >9 with a follow-up PHQ-9 score <5 at 6 months. Find more information on PRO tools and how to use them in practice.

Q. How can I propose a topic for a quality measurement set where I see a gap in care?
A. Contact quality@aan.com to send your ideas to AAN staff.

2016 QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN PRACTICE COURSE

Quality Improvement in Practice Slides

Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) Overview

PDSA Worksheet

Migraine, PD, and Stroke Case Examples

Sample Scoring Sheet

Epilepsy Case Summaries

Valproic Acid Referred for EEG

Measures Under Development

Inpatient & Emergency - Work group forming 2022

General Neurology - Work group forming 2022

Child Neurology - Update in process with public comment planned 2022

Stroke - Update in process with public comment planned 2022

Measure Development

Be part of the measure development process and submit an idea for a future measurement set or volunteer your time to be part of the next measure development work group.

All work group applicants are required to complete a nomination form and the Relationship Disclosure Form via the AAN's Disclosure Management System. This system serves as the centralized place for AAN members and nonmembers to disclose relationships for the past two years that may impact their AAN activities.

If you are applying as a member of a partnering organization and are not an AAN member, you will need to create a non-member ID first. Please follow the steps to create a non-member ID.

To complete the disclosure form, please visit the disclosures portal and select "Update my disclosure." Please note you will need to use either Chrome or Firefox. Please review the FAQs for additional information on how to complete this task.

Email quality@aan.com for more information.

Guidelines

Access clinical practice guidelines to help make decisions on the diagnosis and treatment of neurologic diseases.

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Clinical Informatics

Informatics is the science of information and the nervous system of health care.