In The News

The opportunity to improve healthcare through health IT has never been greater – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides a $20 billion mandate to ensure health IT plays a central role in transforming care, while healthcare reform signed into law ensures performance measures, supported by an electronic infrastructure, drive a national strategy for quality improvement.

Health IT will help ensure care is safer, more affordable, and better coordinated. But to get there, a common language among health IT systems is necessary, and electronic health records, registries, and other health IT tools must capture the right data to support performance measurement. Doing so will give actionable data to providers and others working to improve quality.

NQF’s health IT portfolio supports creating this electronic infrastructure. The Quality Data Model (QDM) is a classification system that describes clinical information used for quality measurement, direct clinical care, research, and public health and provides a standardized terminology to measure quality electronically across care settings.

From converting or “retooling” current measures into eMeasures, to creating a Measure Authoring tool to help measure developers build eMeasures using the QDM, to analyzing how providers use health IT tools, NQF’s ongoing health IT work is building on the QDM and establishing a powerful electronic infrastructure.