Pediatric Asthma Emergency Department Use

This measure estimates the rate of emergency department visits for children ages 3 – 21 who are being managed for identifiable asthma, using specified definitions. The measure is reported in visits per 100 child-years.
The rate construction of the measure makes it a more actionable measure compared to a more traditional quality measure percentage construct (e.g., percentage of patients with at least one asthma-related ED visit). The rate construction means that a plan can improve on performance either through improvement efforts targeting all patients with asthma, or through efforts targeted at high-utilizers, since all visits are counted in the numerator. For a percentage measure, efforts to address high-utilizers will be less influential on performance and potentially have no effect at all even if a high utilizer goes from 8 visits a year to 1, since in order to improve performance, a high-utilizer has to get down to zero visits.
This measure was developed under the Pediatric Quality Measurement Program, funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and administered by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. https://www.ahrq.gov/pqmp/about/what-is-pqmp.html