By Toni Wilken (Meditech), Vice Chair, Quality Measures Workgroup

Creation of the proposed Addressing Social Needs (ASN) electronic quality measure (eCQM) supports the important goal of addressing an unmet need in patient care by helping to improve screening and coordination with local and community-based resources. However, the EHR Association has identified several issues with the measure as proposed by its developer, Yale New Haven Health Services Corporation–Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), which we shared recently in our response to CORE’s call for comments.

ASN eCQM

Briefly, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) engaged CORE to develop a re-designed measure to evaluate how well hospitals were screening for and following up on the social needs of their patients. The result was the ASN eCQM, which is designed to measure screening of patients for social needs within four domains – food insecurity, housing insecurity, utility insecurity, and transportation insecurity – as well as if an intervention activity is performed.