"Quality metrics" is an industry term regarding hitting certain benchmarks of care in a provider's patient population to measure "quality" of care by a provider or group. Payers measure providers for various reasons using well-defined protocols.

An example of a depression protocol is depression remission:

(1) Was an index test performed in prior year to identify depression (2) Was a followup performed this year (3) Does the followup test indicate depression has gone into remission.

There are various other measures for depression.