Quality Measures

Promoting high quality care in sleep medicine has always been a focus of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), which accredited the first sleep center in 1977 and began developing evidence-based practice standards about 25 years ago. Today more than 2,500 AASM accredited sleep disorders centers across the U.S. are providing exceptional care for people who suffer from a chronic sleep disease. In keeping with its mission of promoting high quality care, the AASM has developed sleep quality measures for assessment and management of common sleep disorders.

The AASM continues to prioritize the promotion of high-quality care through quality measure development and implementation. A quality measure maintenance project was initiated in 2019. Each existing quality measure was reviewed and potentially revised to ensure that all measures remain consistent with the most current evidence and are harmonized with any existing quality measures to the greatest extent possible. Revised measures were approved by the AASM Board of Directors for implementation in Sleep CDR and for inclusion in national quality reporting programs, as appropriate.

The 2016 quality measure was developed as part of the National Healthy Sleep Awareness Project, an AASM collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Sleep Research Society. The goal was to develop a quality metric that would determine if appropriate risk assessment for OSA is being performed.

The following sleep quality measures were published as a 6 part series in 2015. The first paper describes the rationale, background, and general methods development, while the remaining five papers detail the quality measures. The AASM recommends the use of these measures as part of a quality improvement program that will enhance the ability to improve the quality of care for patients with sleep disorders. The AASM, in collaboration with the American Thoracic Society, hosted the live Dialogue with a Doctor webinar series focusing on the implementation of these quality measures.

The following adult OSA quality measure set was developed by the AASM and Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI) in 2008, and established the first set of measures that were specific to sleep disorders. This measure set was originally available for reporting through the Physician Quality Reporting System, and will continue to be available for reporting in the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) starting with the 2017 reporting year.