Home > About Us > Leadership > President's Report Archive > May 2001
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Negotiations for office space at 601 13th Street, N.W., Suite 500 North, were concluded, and the lease was signed by both parties. Following a competitive bid process, a contract was awarded to Ward-Hale Design Associates to conduct the limited space design and construction permitting necessary to demise the space. NQF will take occupancy of the new space on August 1, 2001. Office relocation is planned, at this time, to occur during the last week of July and/or the first week of August. (Of note, since the NQF's current sub-lease expires on July 30, 2001, we are exploring whether it will be possible to extend by two days or, alternatively, whether the new premises will be vacated earlier.)
Current NQF staff is at 12.6 FTE, which translates to 16 persons when part-time and contract personnel are included. We are now recruiting for an additional Program Director and/or senior research analyst.
If the Board approves all the proposed members today, the NQF will have 121 organizational members.
The bi-monthly conference call of the Member Council leadership was held on April 12, 2001. Agreement was reached on several logistical items (e.g., draft agenda for the May 30th Membership Meeting and draft agenda for the 2nd Annual Meeting). The leaders provided feedback on developing a policy regarding when and how a member should be suspended for non-payment of dues.
The year 2000 financial audit was completed. This was presented to the Finance Committee during its quarterly conference call on April 26, 2001, and the Committee will report separately to the Board on this.
A small conference grant application has been submitted to AHRQ for the 2nd Annual Meeting.
The Milbank Memorial Fund continued to provide support for the 3rd and final meeting of the "Never Events" Steering Committee. They have been very good to work with.
The Markle Foundation has tentatively agreed to fund at least two commissioned papers for the IT Summit (target Fall 2001). Additional funding is being sought from AHRQ (small conference grant) and others.
A number of conversations have been held with the Kanter Family Foundation about support for various projects, and they are quite interested in a number of things we are doing. While there has been no commitment of funding they wish to continue talking about certain of our efforts, especially with regard to automated information management.
The final meeting of the "Never Events" Steering Committee was held on April 17, 2001, in Washington, DC. The Committee reviewed a draft report, and we anticipate a final report will be available to the membership by May 15, 2001, for discussion at the Spring Membership Meeting on May 30, 2001. Shortly thereafter, the report will move formally into the NQF consensus process.
A grant application has been submitted to the National Patient Safety Foundation to develop and pilot test a standardized instrument for voluntary, confidential reporting of healthcare errors and medical care injuries. The instrument would be designed to facilitate reporting of these adverse events, promote their analysis, support data aggregation and knowledge synthesis, and provide feedback to frontline caregivers.
An implementation and dissemination technical advisory panel has been convened for the "Safe Practices" project. The panel will meet by conference call, and face-to-face at the Annual Meeting. As previously noted, the second meeting of the "Safe Practices" Steering has been scheduled for July 18, 2001, for Washington, DC. The Committee's final (tentatively) meeting has been scheduled for October 29 2001, and is also likely to be held in Washington, DC.
The first meeting of the "Hospitals" Steering Committee met in Dulles, Virginia, on March 21, 2001. The Committee reviewed the current state of hospital performance measurement; how candidate measures should be identified and prioritized; and what criteria and approaches should be used to select measures. The second meeting has been scheduled for May 22, 2001, in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and will be open to NQF Members, only. The Steering Committee will convene for its third meeting on October 24, 2001; this meeting is likely to be at a location outside of Washington, DC.
Discussions about a project to review existing performance indicators for long term care facilities and to establish a core set of quality indicators have continued. The funding entity has agreed, in principle, to move forward, and a contract is now being negotiated.
A draft proposal on a cancer measures project was submitted to the National Cancer Institute in March, and a follow-up "detail" meeting was held at NCI on April 11, 2001. On April 23rd, NQF also met with the American Society of Clinical Oncologists to discuss how to move forward with this project. Outreach is being to other cancer-related groups as wee in anticipation of moving forward on this project later this year.
We are looking for a date and location for the IT Summit in late October or, possibly, early November. Procuring a funding base that will assure a successful effort has taken longer than expected, but it appears to have finally materialized. Several potential sponsors/co-sponsors are still considering their involvement, and we should have a full roster of key "players" within another week or so. A formal planning committee is being convened from among the sponsoring organizations. This will likely be a seminal event in moving the IT agenda forward.
The Institute of Medicine released its report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, which recommends a role for the NQF in identifying priority conditions and strategies, plans and goals to improve healthcare quality related to these conditions. The report also recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services work with the NQF and others to establish and maintain a comprehensive program to make scientific evidence more useful and accessible to providers and patients. I gave several interviews following the release of the report, including NBC Nightly News, Associated Press, and Dallas Morning News, among others.
Since the beginning of January and through the end of April, I have given 26 keynote or plenary session presentations about the NQF, healthcare quality improvement, patient safety and related matters to a wide variety of groups.
Personal (i.e., one-on-one) recruitment efforts have been made with a number of consumer groups, at least some of which have indicated they will join the NQF.
The NQF will be joining the eHealth Initiative, a newly constituted group involving the internet-based health entities. (This is the first organization/activity that the NQF has formally joined.) Given the importance of this area to healthcare and the need for standardization, interoperability, etc., in this area, we believe there will be substantial mutual benefit to being involved with this effort.
A sub-group of Board members met with the SFB on March 8, 2001, in Washington, DC, to discuss deliverables, timing, and implementation of the SFB's report.