This proposal, submitted in response to NIMH RFA-MH-23-265, Developing Measures to Advance Quality in Mental Health Care Services, aims to develop Person-Centered Outcome measures for assessing quality of goal-directed care for individuals with serious mental illnesses (SMI), such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, The project team is comprised of researchers from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), the RAND Corporation, and the University of Pittsburgh with expertise in quality measurement and community-based mental health services research, The approach is one that the NCQA team has been working on since 2013 in the context of care for older adults and people with multiple chronic health conditions, The approach is innovative in combining personalization of goals for individual service users with a method, known as goal-attainment scaling, for tracking progress on goals in a standardized quantitative way that can be used in an outcome measure, NCQA's prior work has been successful in developing measures that are being implemented in several accreditation programs, The proposed project will take the approach developed in the prior work and develop measures specific to community based treatment for adults with SML To do this we will collect quantitative and qualitative data from seven Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics in Texas and Arizona that began implementing the measures in the fall of 2022, as part of an NCQA learning collaborative, The data will be used to assess the measures with respect to the measure endorsement criteria for CMS's Measures Under Consideration process and the new criteria set forth by Battelle's Partnership for Quality Measurement The quantitative data will be used to assess the reliability and validity of the measures and explore strategies for risk adjustment and stratification, Qualitative data, including interviews with clinicians, administrators, and service users with experience with the measures. The inclusion of a Service User Working Group, a panel of 8 individuals with experience receiving mental health care in community mental health settings like those being studied, will provide an important perspective on the measures, Developing these measures will provide an assessment approach, complementary to conventional symptom-based outcome measures, that assesses delivery of person centered care in the context of long-term recovery-oriented treatment of SMI, filling a gap in behavioral health quality measurement identified in the literature, Project Summary/Abstract

This proposal, submitted in response to NIMH RFA-MH-23-265, Developing Measures to Advance Quality in Mental Health Care Services, aims to develop Person-Centered Outcome measures for assessing quality of goal-directed care for individuals with serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, The approach is innovative in combining personalization of goals for individual service users with a method, known as goal-attainment scaling, for tracking progress on goals in a standardized quantitative way that can be used in an outcome measure, Developing these measures will provide an assessment approach, complementary to conventional symptom-based outcome measures, that assesses delivery of person-centered care in the context of long-term recovery-oriented treatment of SMI, filling a gap in behavioral health quality measurement identified in the literature, Project Narrative