Home > About Us > Leadership > President's Report Archive > November 2000
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The NQF staff health insurance plan is in underwriting and scheduled to start December 1, 2000. Life insurance and disability benefits are scheduled for implementation in mid-December.
The lease for space at 1875 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., will expire July 31, 2001. An extensive search for new office space was conducted over the past 3 months. A letter of intent has been negotiated and a proposed lease is under review for office space at 601 13th Street, N.W., beginning August 1, 2001. The cost per square foot will substantially increase.
The conflict of interest policy for staff and Board members continues under review.
Recruitment for a SFB staff person was suspended; a contract with RAND for SFB support has been negotiated.
If the proposed members are approved by the Board today, the NQF will have 104 organizational members.
Vigorous membership recruitment continues, with targeted efforts towards consumers. In this regard, I met with the current five Consumer Council members in October to discuss recruitment. Following this meeting, a letter was sent to the Commonwealth Fund to request funding for "membership scholarships" specifically for consumer organizations (copy in the Board binder). Gerry Shea hosted a briefing of several labor unions at the AFL-CIO on November 17th. Additional calls will be made and briefings will be arranged in the coming weeks.
The elections for leadership of the Member Councils was completed in November, with the results being as follows:
| Consumer: | Judith Lichtman, Chair National Partnership for Women and Families Brian Lindberg, Vice Chair Consumer Coalition for Quality Health Care (term will be split by these two individuals) |
| Provider and Health Plan: | William Gillespie, M.D., Chair Kaiser Permanente Thomas Reardon, M.D., Vice Chair American Medical Association |
| Purchaser: | Christopher Queram, Chair The Alliance Vice Chair TBD |
| Research and QI | William Golden, M.D., Chair American Health Quality Association Deborah Nadzam, Ph.D., Vice Chair Cleveland Clinic Foundation |
Revenue from membership dues exceeded projections for the NQF's first year by more than 50%. (A separate financial report will be provided.)
A $103,440 grant from the Commonwealth Fund was awarded to the NQF on November 14, 2000, to support a workshop on healthcare quality measurement and reporting for minority populations. This project is slated to run from January 1, 2001 to September 30, 2001.
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.