In the 8th Statement of Work, The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is interested in promoting and measuring “the right care for every patient, every time.” To determine whether the patient received the right care [all the recommended care they were eligible to receive for either an acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure (HF) or pneumonia (PN)], CMS developed a composite scoring methodology called the Appropriate Care Measure (ACM). The ACM is a composite measure that captures whether or not a patient received all the care he or she was eligible to receive based on the ten-measure starter set (5 AMI, 2 HF, and 3 PNE) used for the Annual Payment Update. The ACM score is is a new way to look at the quality of care provided in Prospective Payment System (PPS) hospitals. It is a measure of how often the hospital “gets it right .” and focuses on providing “the right care for every person every time.”
