NQF Member and Public Comments Requested on

Health Information Technology Expert Panel Report: Recommended Common Data Types and Prioritized Performance Measures for Electronic Healthcare Information Systems

NQF Member and Public comments due January 11, 2008 by 6:00 PM ET

To address the need for standardization of health care quality measurement, the National Quality Forum (NQF) was commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to assemble and convene an expert panel charged with the following tasks: 

  1. Establish a priority order for the current sets of Ambulatory and Hospital Quality Alliances (AQA and HQA, respectively) approved measures;
  2. Identify common data types from priority measures to be standardized for automation in electronic health records and health information exchanges; and
  3. Develop an overarching quality measure development framework to facilitate developing, using, and reporting on quality measures from EHR systems.

The Health IT Expert Panel (HITEP) was convened twice in Washington, DC on May 31, 2007 and September 24, 2007.  The project did not utilize the NQF Consensus Development Process (CDP) per se, as it did not result in voluntary consensus standards.  Project deliverables included a publicly available final report summarizing the Panel’s conclusions and recommendations including the quality measure prioritization criteria and process and the list of common data types. NQF will ultimately incorporate the Panel’s recommendations into existing endorsement criteria to reinforce the use of the selected data types to allow quality measures to be effectively embedded in EHRs.  

You may post your comments and view the comments of others using the left side  navigation menu.  

NQF will post and take into consideration only those comments received by the above deadline.  NQF reserves the right to identify and remove any objectionable content.  NQF is not responsible for the views and opinions expressed in posted comments.

Download a PDF of the Health Information Technology Expert Panel (HITEP) Report on Recommended Common Data Types and Prioritized Performance Measures for Electronic Healthcare Information Systems draft report.  

Comments must be submitted no later than Thursday, January 11, 2008, 6:00 pm, ET.  NQF strongly prefers to receive comments through the online comment form.

Alternatively, comments may be submitted by email to info@qualityforum.org with the subject line “HITEP report comments;” by mail to NQF, 601 Thirteenth Street, NW, Suite 500 North, Washington, DC 20005; or via fax to (202) 783-3434.