FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASESEP 21, 2017
CONTACT:
Sofia Kosmetatos202-478-9326
press@qualityforum.orgNQF’s Measure Applications Partnership Begins New Initiative to Improve Rural Healthcare
Washington, DC—The National Quality Forum (NQF) is convening a new
Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) workgroup to make recommendations to the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on performance measures to
improve healthcare in the nation’s rural areas.
“Our goal in this new work is to improve care for the 59 million
Americans living in rural areas,” said Shantanu Agrawal, MD, MPhil, NQF’s
president and CEO. “Rural providers face unique measurement challenges—for
example, due to the low volume of patients they serve—and need tailored
approaches in measurement and quality improvement.”
Establishing a MAP Rural Health Workgroup was one of the major
recommendations from a 2015 NQF report. In addition to identifying the
challenges rural providers face in healthcare performance measurement, the report recommended that rural healthcare providers be integrated into federal quality programs so
they are better able to evaluate the care they provide and identify ways to
improve it.
The MAP Rural Health Workgroup will identify the best measures to
assess rural healthcare quality. The workgroup also will determine areas where
new and better measures are needed, as well as recommend ways to streamline
measurement across programs, care settings, and specialties in the public and
private sectors, to reduce measure burden.
Convened in 2011, MAP is a federally funded public-private
partnership that provides annual recommendations
to HHS on the use of quality and efficiency measures in federal public
reporting and value-based payment programs. More than 150 healthcare leaders
from 90 organizations who regularly use measures and measurement information
participate in MAP discussions.
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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.