NQF’s Measure Applications Partnership Begins New Initiative to Improve Rural Healthcare 

Washington, DC—The National Quality Forum (NQF) is convening a new Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) workgroup to make recommendations to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on performance measures to improve healthcare in the nation’s rural areas.

“Our goal in this new work is to improve care for the 59 million Americans living in rural areas,” said Shantanu Agrawal, MD, MPhil, NQF’s president and CEO. “Rural providers face unique measurement challenges—for example, due to the low volume of patients they serve—and need tailored approaches in measurement and quality improvement.”

Establishing a MAP Rural Health Workgroup was one of the major recommendations from a 2015 NQF report. In addition to identifying the challenges rural providers face in healthcare performance measurement, the report recommended that rural healthcare providers be integrated into federal quality programs so they are better able to evaluate the care they provide and identify ways to improve it.

The MAP Rural Health Workgroup will identify the best measures to assess rural healthcare quality. The workgroup also will determine areas where new and better measures are needed, as well as recommend ways to streamline measurement across programs, care settings, and specialties in the public and private sectors, to reduce measure burden.

Convened in 2011, MAP is a federally funded public-private partnership that provides annual recommendations to HHS on the use of quality and efficiency measures in federal public reporting and value-based payment programs. More than 150 healthcare leaders from 90 organizations who regularly use measures and measurement information participate in MAP discussions.

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The National Quality Forum leads national collaboration to improve health and healthcare quality through measurement. Learn more at www.qualityforum.org.