NQF and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Partner to Promote Diagnostic Excellence for Better Healthcare 

Washington, DC – The National Quality Forum (NQF) has partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to explore opportunities to foster diagnostic excellence and overcome barriers to delivering high quality, safe, and effective healthcare. Patients and their healthcare providers rely on accurate and timely diagnoses to effectively evaluate health conditions, determine treatment options, and plan care. Medical diagnostics have a considerable impact on the quality of care, but improvement efforts have been hindered by difficulties in measuring diagnostic accuracy and timeliness. As part of Moore Foundation’s Diagnostic Excellence Initiative, NQF will work with the foundation to identify actionable solutions and forge further consensus on measurement methods for diagnostic performance measures and improvement.

“We are excited for the opportunity to further strengthen the extensive work the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has undertaken to advance diagnostic excellence,” said Dana Gelb Safran, ScD, President & CEO, NQF. “Because medical diagnosis is such a critical element informing care and guiding the course of treatment, measuring and improving diagnostic quality holds enormous potential to improve health outcomes and reduce harm and suffering.”

The Moore Foundation has invested significantly in developing and testing measures of diagnostic excellence in acute vascular conditions, infections, cancer, overlapping diagnoses, and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Thus far, the impact of this work has been constrained by real-world measurement challenges including difficulty accessing the types of data needed to assess diagnostic quality, and gaps in measurement methods needed for novel measures.

Consistent with its role as a consensus-based entity advancing standards for measurement, NQF measurement experts will convene and engage diverse perspectives from across the healthcare ecosystem to identify and drive consensus on solutions to current barriers. Building on the groundbreaking measure development work of the Moore Foundation’s Diagnostic Excellence Initiative, NQF will complete three inter-related bodies of work to support the development and use of measures of diagnostic excellence: identifying and specifying critical technical data standards; advancing consensus on measurement methods central to diagnostic measures, such as the use of natural language processing; and providing an integrated assessment of methods and data, as well as next steps for supporting progress on diagnostic quality measurement.

“The National Quality Forum brings a valuable and unique source of talent and expertise to the challenge of diagnostic quality measurement, and the Moore Foundation is enthusiastic about partnering with them to find new and innovative methods to improve diagnostic excellence,” said Karen Cosby, MD, Program Director of the Diagnostic Excellence Initiative with the Moore Foundation.

Patient safety expert, Kathryn M. McDonald, PhD, MM, is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Systems, Quality, and Safety at Johns Hopkins University, and Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence, and will partner with NQF on the Moore Foundation's Diagnostic Excellence Initiative. “Removing barriers to diagnostic performance measurement will help us get a more complete picture of the diagnostic process to identify opportunities to improve care for patients,” said McDonald. “Diagnostic excellence is about preventing errors and much more. It is a problem-solving process that we need to co-produce with patients. Diagnostic excellence measurement and patient-centeredness need to go hand in hand.”

About National Quality Forum
The National Quality Forum (NQF) works with members of the healthcare community to drive measurable health improvements together. NQF is a not-for-profit, membership-based organization that gives all healthcare stakeholders a voice in advancing quality measures and improvement strategies that lead to better outcomes and greater value. Learn more at www.qualityforum.org.