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Washington, DC, December 7, 1999 - The National Quality Forum for Health Care Measurement and Reporting (National Quality Forum, or NQF) today announced it would move forward with an initiative to standardize hospital performance measures for the nation's approximately 6,500 general acute care hospitals. The project will be funded in part by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It will build on a project developed by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) early this year, which to date has identified 29 measures in the areas of coronary artery disease, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical procedures and complications and pregnancy.
In making this announcement, Kenneth W. Kizer, M.D., M.P.H., President and CEO of the NQF noted, "Launching this initiative comes at a particularly opportune time for the healthcare industry. Medical errors and quality of care improvement are under increasing scrutiny. Standardizing performance measures for hospitals should be a win-win situation for consumers, purchasers, and hospitals."
Currently, hospital's across the United States use a wide variety of measurement systems and performance indicators to assess their quality of care. The number of such performance measures has increased in recent years. Hospitals are committing substantial, and increasing, resources on data collection and measurement as both consumers and purchasers demand greater accountability from healthcare providers. Unfortunately, since the various measures are neither uniform nor standardized, consumers and purchasers of healthcare cannot use the data to make comparisons about quality of care. By standardizing performance measures for hospitals, the NQF and HCFA believe that the overall cost of collecting this data will decrease while at the same time increasing the data's value and usefulness for all parties. This initiative will also create a focus for measurement activities in hospitals that will facilitate internal quality improvement.
The project envisions the standardization of hospital performance measures as occurring in two phases, with the first phase taking about a year and involving an evaluation of the measures to be recommended by JCAHO, as well as other measures, and identifying gaps in the measure sets. The second phase will be a more prolonged effort that builds on phase 1 to examine additional measurement opportunities, expand the data set and fill any gaps identified. Dr. Kizer stressed that this would be a widely inclusive effort, involving the JCAHO, the American Hospital Association and other hospital associations, other provider and professional associations, consumer groups, purchasers and others.
The NQF is a new private, nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve healthcare by improving the processes and technology for measuring and reporting quality in the health care industry. Established as a public-private partnership following a recommendation by the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry, the NQF has broad participation from all parts of the health care sector, including: national, state, regional and local groups representing consumers; public and private purchasers; health care professionals, providers, and plans; accrediting bodies; supporting industries; and health care research and quality improvement organizations.
Information about the JCAHO's measures, which are available for public comment, can be found at www.jcaho.org.