Quality of Care in the Commonwealth

CHIA monitors and reports on health care quality using measures selected from the Commonwealth's Aligned Measure Set (“Measure Set”)—a set of quality measures for voluntary adoption by private and public payers and providers, specifically for use in global budget-based risk contracts—which aims to reduce administrative burden and focus quality improvement efforts on meaningful and high priority measures. CHIA’s 2026 Annual Report covers a subset of measures included in the 2024 Measure Set, including commercial and MassHealth member-reported experiences and select Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) clinical quality metrics.

To date, hospital-based measures have not been considered for inclusion in the Measure Set because global budget-based contracts may not include measures specific to hospital care. However, in acknowledgement of the importance of hospital quality measurement and transparency in health care system monitoring, CHIA also reports patient-reported experiences in hospital settings as well as measures of hospital quality and safety standards from the Leapfrog Group. The metrics included in CHIA’s quality reporting cross different domains of quality assessment, including:

• Clinical quality
• Primary care patient experience
• Hospital patient experience
• Maternity-related care
• Hospital adherence to nursing workforce and hand hygiene standards
• Payer adherence to Aligned Measure Set in global budget contracts   

For more information about the Measure Set, please visit the Quality Measure Alignment Taskforce webpage and CHIA's Quality Measure Catalog Survey results.

Key Quality of Care Findings from CHIA's Annual Report (March 2026)

• When stratified by patient ethnicity or race, significant differences in 2024 performance on clinical quality measures highlight disparities in all 4 care domains: behavioral health, chronic conditions, pediatrics, and preventive care.

• During 2024 primary care visits, commercial patient reported experiences were significantly lower among adult Asian and Black patients compared with White patients for 7 of the 9 care composite measures.

• In 2024, more than two-thirds of the 53 reporting hospitals performed well on nursing workforce metrics—37 of the reporting hospitals achieved the standard for total nursing care hours per patient day, and 35 hospitals achieved the standard for RN hours per patient day.

CHIA Focus on Provider Quality Interactive Data (Updated September 2021)