Chief Complaint–Based Performance Measures: A New Focus for Acute Care Quality Measurement

Performance measures are increasingly important to guide meaningful quality improvement efforts and value-based reimbursement. Populations included in most current hospital performance measures are defined by recorded diagnoses using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision codes in administrative claims data. Although the diagnosis-centric approach allows the assessment of disease-specific quality, it fails to measure one of the primary functions of emergency department (ED) care, which involves diagnosing, risk stratifying, and treating patients’ potentially life-threatening conditions according to symptoms (ie, chief complaints). In this article, we propose chief complaint–based quality measures as a means to enhance the evaluation of quality and value in emergency care. We discuss the potential benefits of chief complaint–based measures, describe opportunities to mitigate challenges, propose an example measure set, and present several recommendations to advance this paradigm in ED-based performance measurement.