NQF’s Ambulatory Care project, a multi-year, multi-phase effort, has sequentially considered performance measures in priority areas identified by NQF members during the Phase 1 workshop. Current activities within Phase 3, Cycle 3 address the priority area of "Special Settings of Care", such as ambulatory surgical centers and healthcare disparities. This report presents 15 additional performance measures in the areas of bone and joint conditions (low-back pain), 1 measure for advanced care planning, and 9 measures for ambulatory surgery centers. A companion report, National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Ambulatory Care: Measuring Healthcare Disparities presents recommendations for using NQF-endorsed™ consensus standards to address the urgent concern of healthcare disparities.
Several Technical Advisory Panels assisted NQF staff in evaluating the candidate measure against the NQF-endorsed measure evaluation criteria of importance, scientific acceptability, feasibility, and usability and provided recommendations to the Steering Committee. Access the measure summary tables and summaries of the TAP meetings or conference calls.
Pursuant to NQF’s Consensus Development Process, these draft documents, along with the accompanying material, is being provided for purposes of review and comment only—not voting. You may post your comments and view the comments of other individuals using the navigation menu at left.
NQF will post and take into consideration only those comments received by the above deadline(s). NQF reserves the right to identify and remove any objectionable content. NQF is not responsible for the views and opinions expressed in posted comments.
NQF Member comments must be submitted no later than 6:00 pm EDT, September 14, 2007. NQF strongly prefers to receive comments through the online comment form.
Alternately, comments may be submitted by email to info@qualityforum.org with the subject line – “Ambulatory Care comments”; by mail to NQF, 601 Thirteenth Street, NW, Suite 500 North, Washington, DC 20005; or via fax to (202) 783-3434.