NQF Announces Winners of Measure Incubator™ Innovation Challenge 

Washington, DC — The National Quality Forum (NQF) today announced five winning concept papers for its Innovation Challenge, marking the first step toward the launch of its Measure Incubator™ Learning Collaborative. The contest, launched on September 18, challenged NQF members and others in the measure development community to submit their ideas to improve quality measurement, and compete to be one of five selected winners to receive a cash prize and present their proposals at an upcoming webinar. The winners announced today propose novel methodological approaches to improving healthcare quality measurement.

NQF issued the Innovation Challenge as part of its Measure Incubator™, an initiative that nurtures the development of needed measures by connecting organizations interested in particular measure concepts with measure development experts, financial and technical resources, and data. NQF’s role in the Measure Incubator is to facilitate the work of others. NQF itself will not develop measures. NQF received a total of 24 submissions for the Innovation Challenge, and all entries will be featured as initial content for the Measure Incubator’s Learning Collaborative. Launching in early 2017, the NQF Measure Incubator Learning Collaborative will share knowledge, lessons learned, and best practices to inform, improve, accelerate, and better target measure development.

“NQF is committed to fostering learning and improvement in the measure development process,” said Cristie Travis, CEO of the Memphis Business Group on Health and a member of NQF’s Measure Incubator Working Group Committee that selected awardees. “All of the papers—and the winners, in particular—pose very thoughtful solutions to improve measure development and close measure gaps, and will undoubtedly inspire everyone working to improve the health and lives of Americans through quality measurement.”

The 2016 Innovation Challenge winners and their organizational affiliations are:

• Charlotta Lindvall, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute—proposes using natural language processing to develop quality measures in palliative surgery using electronic health record (EHR) data
• S. Mani Marashi, Henry Ford Health System—describes a successful two-year pilot to report hospital-acquired venous thromboembolism events in real-time using data from EHRs, rather than claims
• Robert Philips, American Board of Family Medicine—proposes using a new data registry open to all primary care physicians to identify and develop efforts to improve clinical practice and quality measures
• Ellen Shultz and Michelle Langer, American Institutes for Research—suggest using “bookmarking,” a method widely used in educational testing, to score and classify patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures and address this critically important measure gap area
• Tracy Spinks, MD Anderson Cancer Center—outlines a new, streamlined, standardized approach to implementing PRO measure sets in EHRs

The Innovation Challenge winners will present their papers during NQF webinars later this fall. Each winner will receive a cash award of $2,000.

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The National Quality Forum leads national collaboration to improve health and healthcare quality through measurement. Learn more at www.qualityforum.org.