Speakers at a forum hosted by the Alliance for Health Reform and the Commonwealth Fund on Monday said that "patient-centered care" is important in efforts to measure health care quality, CQ HealthBeat reports. At the forum, speakers said that patient-centered care measures can include the level of patient involvement in their health care, the effectiveness of coordination of care among different providers, routine feedback to hospitals, clinical information systems that support high-quality care and publicly available information on patient-centered care. A report recently published in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality Improvement found that patients who received patient-centered care were less likely to experience complications and death than other patients, according to Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis. Davis recommended that CMS include patient-centered care in efforts to link Medicare reimbursements with pay-for-performance measures. She said, "We need to make patient-centered care a central part of pay-for-performance" (Hopkins, CQ HealthBeat, 12/4).

A webcast of the forum is available online at kaisernetwork.org.