Health IT Utilization Expert Panel 

Expert Panel Report:Driving Quality-A Health IT Assessment Framework for Measurement 

The Opportunity

Health information technology (HIT) has the potential to improve the quality and efficiency of our healthcare system. As clinicians and health care organizations increasingly adopt certified electronic health records (EHRs), a critical next step beyond EHR acquisition is to promote effective health IT utilization. Measuring effective utilization will require identifying system capabilities needed to track and monitor when and how health IT is used.

While quality measures evaluate clinical conditions, structural measures evaluate infrastructure. In August 2008, NQF endorsed nine HIT structural consensus standards to assess and encourage HIT adoption by clinicians. The next step in the process is to determine effective usage automatically from the logs in the EHR system, such as which components have been used, by whom, and how often (e.g. frequency of electronic laboratory ordering or electronic prescriptions). Current measures require the clinician to manually enter a quality code every time an electronic prescription is ordered. It seems logical that the EHR, and health IT in general, should keep track of such activity and automatically measure that utilization. Therefore, this expert panel will develop a model that can provide specific data elements to inform future performance measures and practices, including those to identify unintended consequences of health IT usage.

About the Project

In January 2010, the National Quality Forum (NQF) convened the Health Information Technology Utilization Expert Panel to examine, define, and organize the information needed to measure effective health IT use.

The Expert Panel’s output, the Health IT Utilization Assessment Framework is designed to help define a method for expressing data that can be captured by health IT systems to understand and measure their usage.

Process 

This project was guided by an Expert Panel that considers and makes recommendations regarding comments from healthcare stakeholders. The project used relevant elements of NQF’s Consensus Development Process (CDP, version 1.8) to nominate and select panel members, as well as to receive and review comments; however, the process did not involve voting or the endorsement of any products.

Funding 

The project was conducted under a contract with the Department of Health and Human Services, Consensus‐based Entities Regarding Healthcare Performance Measurement.

Related NQF Work 

• Health IT Structural Measures Project 
• Health Information Technology Expert Panel 
• Quality Data Set Model  

Contact Information 

For more information, read the Expert Panel’s report, Driving Quality-A Health IT Assessment Framework for Measurement, or e-mail, HealthIT@qualityforum.org.