AARP Names 2019 Quality Measures Innovation Grant Winners

Date posted: November 20, 2019

AARP announced at the OptumLabs Research & Translation Forum that two institutions were awarded 2019 Quality Measure Innovation grants: the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, and the National Kidney Foundation.

Winners will have access to OptumLabs dataset to develop and/or test innovative health quality measures that address important gaps in care for older Americans. AARP, in collaboration with OptumLabs, established the Quality Measures Innovation Grant program in 2016.

The National Kidney Foundation, in collaboration with AMGA, NCQA, PCPI and the University of California, San Francisco proposed a performance measure to evaluate kidney health in adults with diabetes.

They propose to measure levels of kidney function and damage for patients diagnosed and treated for diabetes to assist with early detection and prediction of patient risk levels for chronic kidney disease (CKD).

This is an important measure for older adults because they have a high prevalence of diabetes and undiagnosed or poorly monitored CKD.

Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality proposed to measure stroke misdiagnosis in hospital emergency rooms. The measure is based on Symptom-Disease Pair Analysis of Diagnostic Error (SPADE), a framework and methodological approach for uncovering misdiagnosis-related harms using "big data."

This measure focuses on patients who experience a poor outcome (i.e., a stroke) when their symptoms are not correctly diagnosed at an emergency room visit. The correct diagnosis of stroke is vitally important as it is among the top five leading causes of death and the leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the U.S.

Measuring stroke misdiagnosis is especially important for older patients because 75% of all strokes occur in patients over age 65 and misdiagnosis of stroke results in substantial harm for all ages.