Timely & Effective Care

Timely and Effective Care measures track whether hospitals follow established clinical protocols for specific conditions and situations. They measure process — the actions taken during care — rather than outcomes like mortality or readmission. A hospital can do everything right on a process measure and still have a bad outcome; conversely, a good outcome can occasionally happen despite poor process adherence.

The rationale for measuring process is that it is actionable and within a hospital's direct control. A hospital cannot guarantee that a patient won't die — but it can guarantee that a sepsis patient receives antibiotics within three hours. Process measures hold hospitals accountable for the things they can actually control.

These measures cover inpatients and outpatients treated at IPPS and OPPS hospitals, and for some measures, voluntary reporters. Not every measure applies to every hospital.

Timely and Effective Care is one of the most heterogeneous hospital datasets in terms of update frequency. SEP-1 and the ED throughput measures are refreshed quarterly — making them among the most current data in the CMS system. Most other measures update annually.

Collection periods range from 3 months (the COVID vaccination measure, now discontinued) to 12 months for most measures. Hospitals report some of this data directly through the Hospital Quality Reporting system; other measures are calculated from Medicare claims. The specific data source and submission method varies by measure ID.

All measures are published together in Timely_and_Effective_Care–Hospital.csv on the Provider Data Catalog, with each row representing one hospital's result on one measure for one collection period.