Battelle annually reviews the PQM Guidebooks outlining its approach to Endorsement and Maintenance (E&M) activities. By reviewing and updating, we ensure our processes and procedures are continually refined and reflective of feedback received throughout the year.
The draft 2025 edition of the E&M Guidebook is open for comment from June 10 to June 29, 2025.
During the Spring 2025 Cycle, we implemented several changes:
- Reduced fatigue by scheduling meetings with five or more measures over two days instead of one.
- Adjusted the consensus threshold to 70% for groups with fewer than 20 voting members, while keeping a 75% threshold for groups with 20 or more members to ensure process integrity.
- Implemented a reconsideration process for maintenance measures that do not reach the 75% consensus threshold but receive between 60% and 74% of votes to retain endorsement.
- Required committee members who vote for "Do Not Endorse/Remove Endorsement" to provide reasons for their vote as part of a refined voting approach.
Additional enhancements will take effect during the Spring 2026 Cycle, including:
- Requiring the Closing Care Gaps domain as part of measure submission.
- Adding measure-specific guidance for pediatric clinical quality measures, cost measures, entity-level reliability and validity testing, and electronic clinical quality measures.
- Establishing percentages for the number of entities needed to meet established reliability estimates for accountable entity-level testing.
- Adding expectations for conducting correlation analyses for accountable entity-level validity testing.
- Adding risk adjustment expectations for new vs. maintenance measures.
- Adding a requirement for measure use that includes a description of the characteristics of an accountability application that this measure would support.