CMS Updates Core Quality Measure Sets on Health Outcomes

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), through the Core Quality Measures Collaborative (CQMC) announced updates to nine of its core measure sets for 2025, sharpening the focus on outcomes, addressing key gaps in existing sets, and removing measures that are outdated, redundant, not in use, or no longer necessary as performance is universally high.

The CQMC is a public–private partnership convened by AHIP and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It includes more than 75 organizations representing patients, purchasers, health plans, providers, and quality experts that work together to promote aligned, high-value core quality measures for use in value-based care.

For the 2025 update, the CQMC concentrated on three priorities:

• Addressing key gap areas where the existing measures did not fully capture high-priority aspects of care, including patient experience, care coordination, and specialty-specific performance.
• Adding new outcome-focused measures that reflect performance on complications, disease control, and avoidable utilization.
• Removing measures that are outdated or not in use to keep the core sets relevant, feasible, and parsimonious for value-based payment arrangements.

The CQMC core sets cover major clinical domains commonly used in alternative payment models and other value-based arrangements, and are designed to streamline measurement so health plans and clinicians can rely on a concise list of measures that support performance improvement and comparability across programs.

The 9 CQMC domains include:

• Accountable Care Organization / Patient-Centered Medical Home / Primary Care
• Behavioral Health
• Cardiology
• Gastroenterology
• Human Immunodeficiency Virus / Hepatitis C
• Medical Oncology
• Neurology
• Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Orthopedics
• Pediatrics