In an annual filing, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) advised that it wants to eliminate 19 of its current quality measurements to reduce administrative burdens on providers, and to eliminate redundancies that exist across its value-based care programs.

Among the proposed eliminations are surgical site infection and antibiotic-resistant pathogen outcome measures, which the agency says are redundant to its Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program, safe-surgery checklist use and stroke education, among others.

CMS noted that it believes eliminating some quality measures will annually save the US healthcare system $75 million and 2 million labor hours. But some industry watchers and healthcare safety advocates have raised concerns that quality of care may, in fact, suffer.

Get the full story and debate here, from Modern Healthcare‘s Maria Castellucci.