GU Cancers 2019 | The importance of quality metrics in kidney cancer care

So quality measures in general are a really important construct because they allow us to figure out where we have gaps in care that we can address through quality improvement and quality insurance initiatives. So it’s hard to know how to kind of globally make clinical health care better unless we know where the problems are, unless we know where the gaps are. And the only way to do that is to measure it. So the purpose of a quality metric is to make sure you’re measuring the right things. We have, in the U.S., a system where there are these kind of licensed quality measures that have been annunciated and approved by a national governing body and one of the things that’s relevant to us is urologists or as GU specialists is that there aren’t a lot of measures that are specific to cancer care in particular, and then some specialty cancer care more specifically. So for example, there are no official for the Center for Medicare, so our main government sponsored insurance, there are no kidney cancer specific metrics. And that leads to a little bit of a breakdown because if our goal is to try to make the care of every kidney cancer patient as optimal as it can be, we don’t know how to do that unless we know where the gaps in care are. And so that’s one of the overarching benefits of quality metrics.