Call for Measures: National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Hospital Care: Outcomes and Efficiency - Phase II

NQF is formally soliciting candidate hospital outcome and efficiency measures for review and evaluation for potential inclusion in its set of voluntary consensus standards for hospital care.  Hospital, outcome, and efficiency are defined and examples of measures are provided in the attachment.

Phase I of this project focused on hospital readmission measures.  This phase of the project encompasses a more expansive view of potential measures of hospital outcomes and efficiency.  We are interested in measures of outcomes including, but not limited to, patient function and healthcare-acquired adverse events or complications; as well as outcomes that are likely to be sensitive to the quality of care coordination and transitions across providers or care settings.  NQF also is interested in measures of efficiency such as appropriateness of care (misuse, overuse/waste, underuse).  Measures that pertain to all or large groups of hospitalized patients are desirable.    

Any organization or individual may submit measures for consideration.  All proposed measures must be submitted by 6:00 pm ET, November 21.

To be included in the initial evaluation, candidate consensus standards must meet the following general conditions:

  • be in the public domain or have a signed intellectual property agreement to make open source,*
  • have an identified responsible entity and process to maintain and update the measure;
  • be intended for both public reporting and quality improvement; and
  • be fully developed and tested so that all the evaluation criteria have been addressed and information needed to evaluate the measure is provided.**

All of the information requested on the Measure Submission Form, Version 3.0 must be submitted for each measure.  Please note that no material will be accepted without fully executing the Intellectual Property Agreement.  All materials not meeting this requirement will be returned to the sender. 

Materials must be submitted electronically via email attachment by 6:00 pm, ET on November 21. 

If you have any questions, please contact, Karen Pace at 202.783.1300 or email at hospitaloutcomes@qualityforum.org.Thank you for your assistance with this project!

 

* NQF requires any organization submitting a measure for endorsement to execute an intellectual property agreement that addresses disclosure of the measure’s proprietary components, including but not limited to specifications, risk adjustment methodologies, data collection instrument, data collection or analysis software, and database access.  For details, please see our Policy on Endorsement of Proprietary Measures.

** Measures that have not been tested are only potentially eligible for a time-limited endorsement and in that case, measure owners must verify that testing will be completed within 24 months of endorsement.