Key Recommendations for Continued Equity Improvements, FY2025 IPPS Proposed Rule, IQR Program

Hospitals are essential to the U.S. health care system and have a critical responsibility to drive improvements in health equity and must be held accountable for driving those improvements and reversing the effects of implicit bias and institutional racism in health care. One tool hospitals have to advance equity and unveil where health disparities exist is the set of equity, quality, and outcomes measures that integrated into all hospital quality reporting programs, including the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) program.

In this letter to CMS, Families USA proposes five improvements to the IQR program to inform the FY 2025 IPPS rulemaking and encourage CMS to consider:

1. Require all hospitals participating in the IQR program to collect patient-reported demographic data;
2. Require hospitals to report on social need interventions;
3. Standardize the collection of the Social Drivers of Health measures;
4. Adopt additional disparities-sensitive clinical measures within the electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) set; and
5. Adopt geriatric specific care measures into the IQR program.