The state of Massachusetts has introduced a number of measures to measure and track health care quality.  One example is the Health Care Quality and Cost Council.  The purpose of the Council is to improve health care quality, reduce racial and ethnic disparities, and contain costs.  The Council achieves this by giving consumers, providers, and insurers health care quality and cost information, establishing quality improvement goals, establishing standard performance measures, quality benchmarks, and encouraging statewide health information technology adoption.  The law requires the Council to annually publish standard performance measures, report on quality measures, pay for performance reimbursement, quality benchmarks on providers, and goals on the adoption of health information technology.1

Massachusetts law requires the Department of Community Health to assess the quality of care delivered to Medicare patients by hospitals.  Hospitals are required to submit data to the Department to conduct the evaluation.2  The state has taken additional steps to monitor and evaluate the quality of health care provided to its Medicaid population by requiring rate increases for Medicaid participating hospitals to be based on adherence to quality standards and benchmarks, including the reduction of ethnic and racial disparities in health care.3  Similar requirements are imposed on personal health care attendants in order to assess the health, welfare and satisfaction of consumers of in home care.4

Massachusetts also has disease or condition specific quality initiatives.  The law requires each cardiac catheterization center to maintain a quality assessment and performance improvement (QAPI) system that focuses on patient outcomes and also looks at overall laboratory safety and efficiency.  The QAPI program must identify indicators of quality based on national standards, collect and maintain data, compare the data to nationally accepted quality benchmarks, and prepare reports comparing results and plan ways to improve quality.5  Similarly, hospitals must collect and analyze data on patients with acute strokes, and identify ways to improve quality.6   The law requires hospitals to submit this data to the Department of Public Health.7  Massachusetts requires similar reporting on patient outcomes data for cardiac surgeries and angioplasties.8