Disability Description of Membership (DDM)

An unduplicated count and percentage of members enrolled at any time during the measurement year, by disability status and disability status source.

Why It Matters

It is estimated that one in four adults in the United States lives with a disability ¹. However, evidence shows that people with disabilities receive poorer quality care and experience worsened outcomes compared to people without disabilities. Individuals with disabilities often face multiple barriers to care, including ableist beliefs from providers, gaps in care coordination, limited access to perinatal care or specialized care for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, and lack of access to clinics or medical diagnostic equipment. These barriers, ranging across systemic, population, and individual levels, have significantly inhibited people with disabilities from receiving fair and adequate care.

To identify the extent of these barriers and disparities in care, data on disability status must be collected and reported across organizations. However, existing initiatives to collect this data do not accurately or comprehensively capture individuals with disabilities. Widespread tools that are used to collect disability data, including the American Community Survey six questions (ACS-6) or Washington Group Short-Set on Functioning (WG-SS), tend to undercount the number of individuals with disabilities, especially those with psychiatric disabilities, mental health or intellectual disabilities, and chronic health conditions ^{2 3}. Limited or incomprehensive disability data collection can ultimately impact the identification of the people with disabilities or stratification of existing measures by disability, which can implicate efforts to reduce disparities in care for this population.

To initiate the collection and standardization of disability data this measure was developed based on six questions from the ACS-6 and one question from the WG-SS due to the wide implementation of these surveys. The DDM measure serves as an initial step to a robust roadmap for improving disability data collection ⁴. Once federal standards for disability data collection are introduced, the scope of this measure will be expanded and updated by NCQA accordingly.

This measure collects disability status of members by data source (self-reported questionnaires, self-reported accommodations, and enrollment data) and disability type (hearing, seeing, concentrating, walking, dressing/bathing, running errands, and communicating). The development of this measure was supported by an environmental scan, which consisted of a literature review and stakeholder interviews, as well as data testing, a technical expert group, and NCQA’s measurement advisory panels.

Historical Results – National Averages

Performance results for this measure are currently unavailable.