For a growing number of functionally limited, seriously ill adults, primary and palliative care must be delivered in the patient’s home. However, performance measures do not currently exist to track the quality of medical care provided in the home setting.

With support from CHCF and other funders, researchers with the University of California, San Francisco, and with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine will test measures that describe the quality of care delivered in the home and develop a data collection tool to enable providers to report on their performance relative to the measures. Reported data can then be used by practices to benchmark their performance and see where they need improvement.

Community-based palliative care programs are expected to increase dramatically in the next 10 years, leading payers to look for performance data that supports this model of care delivery. The efforts of the National Home-Based Primary and Palliative Care Network, when joined with the National Palliative Care Research Center and the Palliative Care Quality Network (hospital-based reporting), have the potential to help clinicians monitor and improve the care they provide across the continuum.

To learn more about the emerging quality framework for the care of homebound older adults, read the Health Affairs article, “The Invisible Homebound: Setting Quality-of-Care Standards for Home-Based Primary and Palliative Care,” available in the external link below.