Quality Measures

Core measures are one way that hospitals assess the quality of their care. Core measures consist of guidelines or steps in the care process that have been proven through research to improve patients’ treatment results or outcomes. Hospitals monitor how well they perform the core measures by tracking information from patient records.

The core measures were developed by The Joint Commission based on quality indicators defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) in 2000. Today the core measures are used in multiple quality improvement initiatives nationally. They are publicly available online on HospitalCompare.gov as well as through reports from individual hospitals and hospital groups.  

At Stony Brook University Hospital we monitor and report more than 50 core measures in six major categories of care. Sometimes, guidelines and measures are revised to reflect new evidence and therefore may change over time.