Developing dialysis facility-specific performance measures for public reporting.

The Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997 directed CMS to implement a system to measure and report the quality of dialysis services under Medicare by 2000. Because of this tight timeframe, a rapid-cycle measurement development process was initiated to develop dialysis facility-specific measures that could be released to the public. The result was "Dialysis Facility Compare" which has served as a template for the development of public reporting initiatives for other providers in the Medicare Program. This article describes the process used for developing and reporting these performance measures and the lessons learned for future work in this area.