National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Hospital Performance: Additional Priority Areas 2005

Background

To date, the National Quality Forum has endorsed 65 voluntary consensus standards for measuring the performance of acute care hospitals. The first set of endorsed measures (National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Hospital Care: An Initial Performance Measure Set) identified 39 measures in 8 priority areas (acute coronary syndrome; heart failure; patient safety; pediatric conditions; pneumonia; pregnancy/childbirth/neonatal conditions; smoking cessation; and surgical complications). Subsequent consensus projects added 15 measures that are especially sensitive to the quality of nursing care (National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Nursing-Sensitive Care: An Initial Performance Measure Set) and 21 measures specific to cardiac surgery (National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Cardiac Surgery). (Ten measures were endorsed in more than one project.) Despite this growing list of endorsed measures, many critical aspects of hospital care are not addressed. The need to fill gaps in the measure sets is noted by various stakeholders including purchasers creating payment incentive programs, consumers seeking information about providers, providers comparing themselves to their peers in the marketplace, and many other stakeholders who want to stimulate overall improvement in the quality of care in hospitals. In a series of “listening sessions” convened by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), participants discussed additional areas where standardized, publicly reported performance measures are needed. Among the measures identified as needed were measures of coordination of care and measures of mortality.

Scope*

This project will:

• Apply the guiding principles outlined in A Comprehensive Framework for Hospital Care Performance Evaluation to additional areas of performance measurement.
• Evaluate and endorse additional performance measures to include a broader array of services and care contexts, with particular emphasis on care coordination, and on measures of mortality for AMI, HF and pneumonia. These additional areas of focus will expand the usefulness of NQF-endorsed hospital performance measures.

Funding

Support for this project has been provided by the CMS.

* At the request of CMS, the previously announced area of rural-sensitive measures will not be pursued at this time.

For more information, contact Reva Winkler, MD, MPH, or Elaine Power, MPP, at 202.783.1300 or e-mail info@qualityforum.org.