Issue Briefs

Performance Measurement and Reporting at the Clinician Level: Improving Its Potential While Developing More Comprehensive Care Accountability. Examines concurrent efforts to more broadly define relevant, important, and measurable elements of condition-specific episodes of care and related accountability.

Closing the Disparities Gap in Healthcare Quality With Performance Measurement and Public Reporting. Highlights the challenges the American healthcare system faces as a result of disparities in care and summarizes important initiatives under way at the national, regional, and local levels.

Battling Healthcare-Associated Infections Through Public Accountability. Describes current reporting efforts intended to promote accountability concerning HAIs and discusses some of the challenges raised by these initiatives.

Nursing Performance Measurement and Reporting. Describes the initial steps that have been taken by early adopters of nursing quality standards and measures to build a platform for public reporting, and notes of some future directions that promise to advance these efforts.

Providing Consumers with Useful Information About Healthcare Prices. Examines the drive for price transparency, its potential pitfalls, and the relationship between the distribution of pricing information and the growing demand for public accountability.

WIRED FOR QUALITY: The Intersection of Health IT and Healthcare Quality. Explores how health IT can improve the quality of healthcare; the benefits of EHRs to clinical practitioners (e.g., clinical decision support); and the importance of ensuring that quality improvement and health IT adoption go hand-in-hand. March 2008.

Responding to the Call for Efficiency. Examines Virginia Mason Medical Center's (VMMC)'s response to the rollout of performance measurement based on efficiency across episodes of care. June 2007.

Strengthening Pediatric Quality Measurement and Reporting. Reviews the ongoing work to bring pediatric care into the fold of pay-for-performance and public reporting initiatives and how it can improve children's healthcare. May 2007

The Promise of Personal Health Records for Quality Improvement. Describes the many distinct ways Personal Health Records (PHRs) can contribute to quality improvement and discusses the key challenges that need to be addressed to realize this potential. April 2007

Local Coalitions Identified as Platform for National Quality Reporting Effort. Provides an overview of the new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) pilot project that relies on local coalitions for physician performance measurement and reporting and the planned national expansion of this model under Secretary Leavitt’s “Value-Driven Health Initiative.” March 2007.

Newsletter: Navigating Quality

NQF’s Navigating Quality Newsletter focuses on developments among payers, policy makers, and industry to promote quality healthcare.  News items focus on three key drivers of change: public reporting; payment strategies, and information technology.

Navigating Quality November / December 2007

Navigating Quality / March/April 2007

Navigating Quality /January/February 2007

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