Care coordination involves deliberately organizing patient care activities and sharing information among all of the participants concerned with a patient's care to achieve safer and more effective care. For the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, AIR developed, tested, and validated the Care Coordination Quality Measure for Primary Care (CCQM-PC), a survey-based assessment of the quality of care coordination for adults in primary care settings.

AIR rigorously tested the CCQM-PC in diverse primary care settings and found the instrument to be a reliable and valid measure of patient experiences of care coordination. Through formative research with patients and caregivers, AIR overcame the challenge of how to assess patients’ reports of coordination activities that they often do not directly witness by exploring with patients and caregivers how differing levels of coordination affect their care, health, and experience.

Initially designed as a research tool to build evidence about the relationship between care coordination and health outcomes, the CCQM-PC provides an important foundation for developing care coordination measures for accountability and payment purposes.