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Washington, DC, September 23, 1999 - The National Quality Forum (NQF) - a not-for-profit membership organization created to develop and implement a national strategy for measuring and reporting health care quality - officially launched its efforts at a public roundtable discussion today.
Group officials laid out an ambitious agenda designed to meet national goals to improve quality measurement and reporting across all sectors of the health care delivery system. As part of this agenda, the NQF will:
As it meets these goals, the National Quality Forum will help educate health care consumers, providing them with information needed to make informed health care choices.
"The National Quality Forum is committed to using quality measurement and reporting to drive quality improvement in our health care system," said National Quality Forum Chairman Gail Warden, President and Chief Executive Officer of Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. "By bringing all segments of the health care industry together to address quality, we can make a real difference in improving the health of all Americans."
The Forum also officially announced the appointment of Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer as President and Chief Executive Officer of the organization. Dr. Kizer most recently served as Under Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and is widely credited as being the chief architect and driving force behind the greatest transformation of VA health care since its creation in 1946.
"We want to melt the iceberg of quality information and let it flow into the hands of consumers so that they can make fully informed choices about what they are buying," Kizer said. "The National Quality Forum is committed to this end and will work to identify those tools needed by all consumers, purchasers, and providers to assess the quality of key health care programs, procedures, and activities."
"In virtually every other industry, improvements in quality result in a reduction in cost," Kizer said. "There's no reason to believe that is not so in health care as well."
The National Quality Forum is a public-private partnership designed to involve all segments of the nation's health care system. The organization was proposed as part of the 1998 findings of the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. Since the release of those findings, leaders from consumer, purchaser, provider, health plan, and health service research organizations, as well as from government, met to define the mission, structure, and financing of NQF, with staff support from United Hospital Fund of New York.
NQF is primarily a membership dues-financed organization, and receives significant public and private funding from foundation and corporate grants, including a $2.5 million founding grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a $1 million founding grant from the California Healthcare Foundation. NQF has also received additional financial support from The Commonwealth Fund and United Hospital Fund.
For more information on the National Quality Forum and its efforts, or to request an interview with a member of the Forum leadership, please call Patrick Riccards or Emily Heil at 202-667-0901.