Payment Information Calculation System (PICS) Healthcare Quality Measure Specification

Abstract

Measurement of healthcare quality in multiple care settings is a top priority. The ability to keep pace with the evolving standards of care to ensure we are measuring the right things at the right time is critical. The flexibility to add, update, and retire quality indicators easily and in tight timescales is essential. The Payment Information Calculation System (PICS), utilized in multiple national contracts for healthcare quality data collection and calculation, is facilitating the ability to respond. The design of the system enables increased efficiency by incorporating rules-driven technology. The tool provides non-developer subject matter experts the ability to define clinical data collection business rules in an XML format used by the PICS consumer to generate data collection user interfaces. This flexibility provides the ability to construct new data collection modules complete with data capture definitions, flow-logic (skip patterns) and enforce data collection formats and validate captured data (edits).