NQF has been tasked with soliciting candidate performance measures for review, evaluation, and potential endorsement as national voluntary consensus standards for measures of care in the area of surgery and anesthesia care, specifically:
To date, NQF has endorsed over 100 clinician-level performance measures in a variety of areas. To meet CMS’s need for additional quality measures for use in CMS’s Physicians Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), NQF will use its formal Consensus Development Process (CDP) to seek consensus-based endorsement of performance measures relevant to the Medicare population in the following clinical/topic areas: anesthesiology, perioperative management, and general thoracic surgery.
NQF has endorsed a number of performance measures applicable to ambulatory care surgical centers, cardiac surgery, and hospital-level surgery and anesthesia measures. However, significant gaps still exist. The clinical-level surgery and anesthesia project will include a call for measures on: 1) anesthesiology; 2) perioperative management; and 3) general thoracic surgery. This project will also review new procedure codes as additions to the peri-operative antibiotic measures endorsed earlier this year.
The candidate measures will be considered for NQF endorsement as voluntary consensus standards. Agreement around the recommendations will be developed through NQF’s formal Consensus Development Process (version 1.8). This project, like all NQF activities, involves the active participation of representatives from across the spectrum of healthcare stakeholders and is guided by a Steering Committee.
Funding for this project has been provided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
For more information, contact Kristyne McGuinn at 202.783.1300 or kmcguinn@qualityforum.org