A New Roadmap to Create Benchmarks for High-Quality, Value-Based Care

On July 17, researchers from the Center for Effectiveness Research Orthopaedics (CERortho) released a new and comprehensive analysis establishing benchmarks of quality care in the field of physical therapy.

Titled the “Evaluation of Legacy Patient Reported Outcome Measures as Performance Measures in Rehabilitation,” the report was published after months of close collaboration with the PT community. As a multi-practice analysis of open source, risk-adjusted clinical treatment outcomes, the report provides physical therapists with invaluable insights into the delivery of high value care while also giving lawmakers and payers a clear sense of the value of PT services to American patients every year.

Some of the key findings of the report were as follows:

• Clinically important improvements in Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) were observed across body regions over 12-14 visits.
• Baseline patient factors for all data contributors explain a large portion of variation in PROs change within episodes. Payer type, patient socio-demographic factors, and comorbidities at baseline all had strong effects on PRO changes over episodes of care. Differences in these baseline patient factors must be accounted for to ensure fair performance comparisons of physical therapists.
• When reporting clinical outcomes as a measure of quality of care for outpatient physical therapy; risk adjustment should be included and include factors like BMI, patient age, comorbidities, smoking status, chronicity, pain, zip code of residency, payer type; as these factors influence the patient outcome and the utilization of physical therapy services. 

To read the full report, CLICK HERE.