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Alliance for Aging Research urges CMS to replace long‑stay antipsychotic quality measure
Summary
Scott Frey said the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' long‑stay antipsychotic quality measure fails to distinguish appropriate prescribing, creating pressure to withhold needed treatment; he urged CMS to retire and modernize the measure.
Scott Frey, senior vice president of public policy and government relations at the Alliance for Aging Research, criticized the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' long‑stay antipsychotic quality measure as too blunt to reliably indicate quality. He said the metric treats lower prescribing as synonymous with higher quality and relies on only three exempt conditions, which "does not distinguish between clinically appropriate and inappropriate prescribing."
Frey argued the measure's effect is to create disincentives for clinicians to provide clinically appropriate antipsychotic treatment, sometimes leading to involuntary discharges or barriers to nursing home admission. "We respectfully continue to urge CMS to retire the current measure and replace it with a targeted low burden improvements to the minimum dataset that strengthen prescribing documentation, reinforce multidisciplinary clinical oversight, and better distinguishes clinically appropriate care from misuse," he said.
The speaker asked CMS to modernize measurement to reflect newer FDA‑approved therapies, improve prescribing documentation, and advance person‑centered care so that quality metrics do not unintentionally harm residents who need treatment.
