Signals from the 2026 CMS Quality Conference
At the 2026 CMS Quality Conference, CMS leaders and stakeholders described a future that looks meaningfully different from today’s health care system: one that is more proactive, more data-driven, and more tightly aligned to outcomes.
Across sessions, one theme stood out: quality is no longer being positioned as a retrospective reporting exercise. Instead, CMS is increasingly framing quality as a real-time, system-wide strategy that connects prevention, data, payment, and patient experience.
While none of these ideas are entirely new, the conference made clear that they are beginning to converge. Several signals stood out.
Prevention Is Moving from Priority to Foundation
CMS is increasingly organizing its work around a simple idea: the system cannot continue to rely on diagnosing and treating disease after it appears.
Speakers pointed to earlier risk identification, stronger primary care, and expanded use of community-based supports as essential to improving long-term outcomes. Prevention was discussed not as a standalone initiative, but as a thread running across programs and models.
At the same time, leaders acknowledged a persistent challenge: prevention is harder to measure and reward. That tension is driving many of the changes underway in measurement and payment design and will require organizations to rethink how they identify risk earlier and intervene outside traditional clinical settings.
Measurement Is Evolving Toward More Real-Time, Actionable Insights
Across sessions, speakers highlighted ongoing efforts to evolve quality measurement to better support care delivery.
CMS and national leaders described a shift toward approaches that are more digital, continuous, and integrated into care workflows. The goal is to complement traditional reporting with insights that can be used more directly by clinicians and patients.
This includes a growing focus on real-time data and interoperability, patient-specific insights, and patient-reported measures and lived experience.
Rather than expanding measurement, the emphasis is on making it more timely, relevant, and usable at the point of care.
The Push to “Measure Less, Measure What Matters” Is Real
State and provider perspectives highlighted how expanding measure sets can dilute focus and limit impact. In contrast, more targeted approaches, centered on a smaller number of high-value metrics, are beginning to show stronger results.
This reflects a broader shift: success will depend less on the volume of measures and more on whether a focused set of metrics is aligned across payers, actionable for providers, and directly tied to outcomes.
Payment, Technology, and Models Are Being Aligned Around Outcomes
Across sessions, CMS leaders described ongoing efforts to better align payment and care delivery with outcomes.
This includes designing models that provide providers with greater flexibility in how care is delivered while maintaining accountability for results. Technology is increasingly positioned as a core enabler in this approach. Not as an add-on, but as infrastructure to support more continuous, proactive care and real-time decision-making.
Importantly, these efforts are being framed beyond Medicare. Leaders pointed to Medicaid alignment and broader market spillover, signaling a more coordinated strategy for system change.
Affordability and navigation also featured prominently. Even high-quality care, speakers noted, has limited impact if patients cannot access it, afford it, or navigate it effectively.
Advancing Quality Will Also Depend on How Change Happens in Practice
While much of the conference focused on models and infrastructure, several discussions emphasized another challenge: how these changes actually show up in day-to-day care.
Speakers noted that advancing quality will require continued attention to how patients, clinicians, and organizations adopt and apply new approaches. This includes:
Ensuring information is accessible and meaningful
Tailoring communication to different individuals and settings
Supporting trust, engagement, and shared decision-making
The future of quality is not only technical. It depends on whether these changes improve how care is experienced and delivered in practice.
Rural Health Transformation
CMS brought all 50 states together at the Quality Conference for dedicated Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) sessions, reinforcing how central state engagement will be to this work. States are expected to stay involved in these efforts throughout the five-year program.
As RHTP shifts from planning into implementation, some of the early realities are starting to come into focus. States had a relatively short window to develop their plans and are now working to turn those ideas into something operational. That means building out infrastructure, standing up teams, and figuring out how to align funding to actually move things forward.
At the same time, some states are still working through the steps needed to fully access and deploy funding, which is slowing progress on hiring and program launch. As those pieces fall into place, many are getting ready to release RFAs and RFPs to support provider-led transformation. How that unfolds will be important in shaping the broader impact of rural health efforts.
What Comes Next for Health Care Quality
Taken together, the signals from this year’s conference point toward a more integrated vision of health care quality that is preventive, real-time, outcome-focused, and easier for patients to navigate.
The direction is becoming clearer. The challenge now is execution: translating these ideas into care that works differently and better in practice. For providers, ACOs, and state partners, that means moving beyond reporting and redesigning how care is delivered, measured, and supported in real time.