The core of the work of the Quality & Measurement Department is to help our members improve the quality of care they provide to their patients. The department focuses primarily on healthcare performance measurement and on various types of quality improvement education and initiatives.

Our National Quality Agenda and Strategies for Urologic Practice articulates six priorities and four strategies to guide the AUA’s measurement and quality improvement activities for the next decade. The priorities represent the most pressing concerns for urology and the strategies describe the approaches we will use to address those priorities. 

Healthcare Performance Measurement

The AUA develops and maintains urology-specific performance measures that are implemented primarily in its AQUA Registry. These measures address such urologic conditions as prostate cancer, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), stones, and bladder cancer, among others. Urologists can use these measures in internal quality improvement efforts as well as for the CMS Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), which is a pay-for-performance quality improvement program for clinicians. Measure maintenance activities includes ensuring that that there is still a deficiency in care quality that can be impacted by the measures, that the clinical evidence underlying the measures has not changed, that the way the data are collected for the measures still makes sense, and that measure specifications use the most up-to-date coding schemas, as appropriate.

Quality Improvement (QI) Activities

The goals of our QI efforts are to provide timely and useful guidance to the field on quality and safety issues relevant to urology and to serve as a resource for educational materials on QI science and methods. Current activities supporting these goals include:

• Engage with Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (E-QIPS) initiative
• Developing written materials on specific quality/patient safety issues
• Convening QI Summits
• Developing other educational offerings