Home > About Us > Leadership > President's Report Archive > December 2004
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No significant changes.
Dianne Feeney, BSN, MSc will join NQF later this month as a Vice President. We are currently recruiting for one Program Director/Senior Program Director (e.g., RN, PharmD, PhD, MD plus 5-10 years experience) and one Masters-level Research Analyst.
If the applications that are pending Board action are approved, membership will stand at 264 organizations.
All Member Councils continue to meet regularly by conference call and/or e-mail.
The meeting was attended by more than 250 individuals and based on the feedback was well-received. Next year’s meeting will be held at the Grand Hyatt Washington, DC, on October 6-7, 2005 (both meeting rooms and sleeping rooms). As noted previously, the call for abstracts for the 6 th Annual Meeting will focus solely on implementation of NQF-endorsed consensus standards. Based on the evaluations, some Members are interested in a 2.5-day meeting, with the extra time devoted to Member Council break-outs. Other Members, however, oppose expansion of the current 2-day meeting format. As the time draws closer, we will work with Member Council leadership on whether to expand the Annual Meeting to 2.5 days.
The Board will consider reappointments for terms expiring on December 31, 2004. Additionally, the Research and Quality Improvement Organization Council and the Health Professional, Provider, and Health Plan Council are holding their leadership elections; the deadline for balloting is November 30, 2004. A run-off will be held if a candidate for a particular office does not receive >50% of votes cast. The Governance Committee also has called for candidates to fill the vacancy created by Mary Kennedy’s resignation due to a career change.
NQF staff have collected a few examples of Board evaluation forms and would welcome additional material that will be provided to the Governance Committee in its review of term limits.
Negotiations with Delmarva are nearing completion for the vehicle that will fund consensus development of the DOQ/physician-focused ambulatory care measures, the larger phase II ambulatory measure set build-out of the 10 priority areas, and some preliminary evaluative work on pediatric hospital and ambulatory care measures for asthma and medication management (identified as being the two areas likely to have available measures); total funding is $910,000. Additionally, we anticipate funding by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of the palliative care framework and preferred practices ($249,000). On a related front the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization has agreed to fund a small meeting to begin discussing the build-out of a measure set for hospice and palliative care that will follow from the framework/practices phase.
Standardizing a Measure of Patient Experience (HCAHPS)
CMS has provided funding for a project to consider the HCAHPS survey instrument, which was delivered to NQF on November 8, as a standardized measure of patient experience. The Review Committee, which will be co-chaired by Gerry Shea and Jim Varnum, will meet on December 1.
National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Hospital Care—Additional Priority Areas
CMS has provided funding for a project to review possible consensus standards in two additional hospital areas—coordination of care and rural-sensitive—with the possibility of a third to be named. A Call of Nominations for Steering Committee members was issued. The deadline for nominations is December 6.
National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Nursing-Sensitive Care Performance Measurement
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) recently announced it had received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop detailed microspecifications to operationalize the NQF-endorsed set.
Cardiac Surgery Performance Measures
An appeal from New York state was received and will be discussed at the Board meeting.
Child Healthcare Quality
Proceedings from the workshop were published and distributed in July 2004. Plans are being finalized with CMS to conduct preliminary evaluative work on hospital and ambulatory pediatric measures for asthma and medication management.
Home Health Performance Measures
The draft report will be forwarded to NQF Members for voting on November 26.
Behavioral Health
The workshop proceedings are in the publication process.
Patient Safety Taxonomy
The draft report recommending the JCAHO taxonomy and the Institute of Medicine’s reporting domains, as well as accompanying recommendations for improvements, will be available for Member review in late November/early December, pending the outcome of intellectual property discussions with JCAHO.
Ambulatory Care Quality Measures
The CMS request (via Delmarva subcontract) to consider its physician-focused measure (often referred to as the Doctor Office Quality (DOQ) measures, but which also include measures from the American Medical Association and the National Committee for Quality Assurance) is being finalized. As agreed to at the April meeting, the DOQ measures will initially proceed through expedited consensus, but they will be re-evaluated under full consensus (with a call for measures) during phase II. CMS is also providing year 1 funding for the build-out of the set in the 10 priority areas identified in phase I. Discussions are being held with RWJF on its contributions to the phase II work.
Improving Safe Use of Prescription Medications
This project, funded by the California Endowment, will establish a “safe medication use framework” aimed at increasing the effectiveness of prescription medication use by consumers, focusing especially on low-literacy and limited English proficiency populations. A workshop was held October 25-26, 2004, in Washington, DC, and the framework and recommendations are being drafted.
Hospital Governance and Quality Improvement
An invitational workshop on hospital governance and quality improvement aimed at defining the role of Boards of Trustees in overseeing hospital quality improvement efforts was held on March 30, 2004. The draft “call to responsibility,” was circulated to participants and NQF Members for review, and a final document will be considered by the Board at the December meeting.
Evidence-based Practices for Substance Abuse Treatment Workshop
On December 13, NQF will convene a workshop to i) identify a set of evidence-based treatments for substance use disorders that are widely recognized as being important components of effective treatment programs, and ii) recommend a set of program-level descriptors relating to those attributes that indicate that evidence-based substance abuse treatments are being provided by the program to its clients.
ACEIs vs ARBs Performance Measure Resolution Workshop
In 2002, NQF endorsed two measures (developed jointly by JCAHO and CMS), addressing use of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI) drugs for patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction complicating acute coronary syndrome and heart failure. Ongoing research has identified a new class of drugs, angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), with similar effects as ACEIs. On November 3, the workshop, which is co-sponsored with AHRQ, examined the current evidence on use of ACEIs and ARBs to address whether the currently endorsed measures should be updated to include broader use of ARBs. At the workshop JCAHO, CMS, and the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association proposed a two-phase solution, which is being reviewed by NQF Member Councils and will be discussed by the Board at the December meeting.
State-of-the-art in Performance Review Instruments Workshop
A comprehensive quality/performance review program is a management tool used by healthcare systems to aggregate and quantify the various aspects of hospital care to enable comparisons of performance. These programs may include a variety of domains, such as external review (e.g., JCAHO survey results), patient safety, liability/risk management, satisfaction (customer, patient, employee, provider), financial performance, efficiency, and personnel development. A commissioned paper will review current knowledge about the broad hospital quality/performance reporting tools and be discussed by workshop participants, with an eye toward recommending the domains that these tools should encompass, as well as data categories or elements and reporting formats. Finalization of the agreement with HCA, which will fund the project in part, is underway.
DVT Performance Measures
We are finalizing the subcontract with JCAHO for this project, which is funded by an unrestricted grant from Aventis.
Cancer Care Quality Measures
The Steering Committee met on October 18 to refine the scope and review the recommendations of the Cancer Data and Methods Panel for evaluating potential consensus standards. The project’s Breast Cancer Technical Panel met on November 16, and will begin evaluating measures in early 2005. The project’s Colorectal Cancer Technical Panel will meet on December 10, and the Symptom Management/End-of-life care Technical Panel will meet on December 17.
Informed Consent and Patient Safety
This project, funded by the Commonwealth Fund, is exploring the implementation of the NQF-endorsed “safe practice” (#10) relating to informed consent for low literacy/limited English proficient patients. The three “early adopter” collaborating partners completed their self-assessment of implementation of Safe Practice 10, which was followed by site visits and interview by NQF staff. Additionally, 19 non-adopters were interviewed in-depth by phone. The workshop to discuss the case studies, results of interviews of non-adopters, and draft user’s guide for implementation was held on September 10, 2004. The proceedings and user’s guide are now being prepared.
National Commission for Quality Long-Term Care
A press conference to formally launch the Commission will be held on October 12th. Former Senator Bob Kerrey and former Speaker Newt Gingrich are the Commission’s co-chairs, which include two sitting governors: Mark Warner of Virginia and Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho. An organizing meeting for the Commission will be held on December 3, 2004.
An active outreach effort continues.
The deadline for NQF Member comments on the report of the Advisory Committee on Data Integrity and Availability is November 22. Comments will be synthesized and further discussed with the Committee following the deadline.