The Opportunity

Ensuring person and family centered care is a core concept embedded in the National Quality Strategy priority of ensuring that each person and family is engaged as partners in their care. Person and family-centered care encompasses patient and family engagement in care, including shared decision-making and preparation and activation for self-care management, and the outcomes of interest to patients receiving healthcare services, including health-related quality of life, functional status, symptoms and symptom burden, and experience with care. Due to the large number of person- and family-centered care measures, maintenance review of endorsed measures and consideration of new measures is taking place over several phases. The 2014-2015 phase focused on reviewing experience with care measures, during which NQF endorsed one new measure and continued endorsement for ten measures. Currently, in the 2015-2016 phase the Committee is examining clinician and patient-assessed measures of functional status. This new phase of work will focus on the health-related quality of life and communication domain of person-and family-centered care.

Objectives

A multi-stakeholder Standing Committee will evaluate newly submitted measures and measures undergoing maintenance review and make recommendations for which measures should be endorsed as national consensus standards. This Committee will work to identify and endorse new performance measures for accountability and quality improvement that specifically address the area of person- and family-centered care. Measures concerning outcomes, treatments, diagnostic studies, interventions, or procedures associated with person- and family-centered care will be considered.

NQF Process

Measures will be considered for NQF endorsement as national voluntary consensus standards. Consensus on the recommendations developed through NQF's formal Consensus Development Process (CDP, Version 1.9). This project involves the active participation of representatives from across the spectrum of healthcare stakeholder and will be guided by a Standing Committee (PDF).

Funding

This project is supported under a contract provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. For information about the availability of auxiliary aids and services for NQF’s federally funded projects, please visit: http://www.medicare.gov/about-us/nondiscrimination/nondiscrimination-notice.html.

Contact Information

For more information, please contact the project team at 202-783-1300 or via email at pfcc@qualityforum.org.