Measuring Performance
 

Regionalized Emergency Care: Phase I 


Project Status: Completed

Regionalized Emergency Medical Care Services

Access the Endorsement Summary (PDF) | Access the Full Report 

The Opportunity

Healthcare quality and costs are some of the fundamental drivers of today’s health reform movements. Regionalizing emergency medical care services is one policy option for improving care while making more efficient use of medical resources. By analyzing the effectiveness of quality measures already in place and identifying gaps in the measurement of regionalized emergency medical care services, the National Quality Forum (NQF) aims to establish a more detailed picture of how to approach a systematic regionalization of emergency services at the national, state, and regional levels.

About the Project

The Regionalized Emergency Care project seeks to expand NQF’s previous work in the emergency care arena (Emergency Care: Phase I and Emergency Care: II Report), which sought to endorse consensus standards for emergency care provider and system performance. This project, which began in June 2010 and encompasses an environmental scan and a commissioned paper, seeks to identify approaches for systematically regionalizing emergency care services at the national, state, and regional levels. The commissioned paper will include a framework to assess current regionalized emergency medical care services’ measures and guide future measure development while identifying measure gaps. The environmental scan and commissioned paper will help inform a potential Phase II of the project, which would seek to identify a set of performance standards for measuring and reporting the quality of emergency services at the national, state, and regional levels.

Process 

In Phase I, a contractor will perform an environmental scan of fully developed or pipeline measures for emergency care at the system level. The environmental scan will help inform the development of a commissioned paper, which will serve as a conceptual framework to guide measure development. Phase I of the project is scheduled to be completed in December 2011. After approval from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) at the completion of Phase I, NQF will proceed with Phase II of the project.

In Phase II, candidate measures will be considered for NQF endorsement as voluntary consensus standards. Agreement around the recommendations will be developed through NQF’s Consensus Development Process (CDP, Version 1.8). This project involves the active participation of representatives from across the spectrum of healthcare stakeholders.

Project Funding 

This project is funded under NQF's contract with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Related NQF Work 

Contact Information 

For further information, contact Akin Demehim, MPA, at 202-783-1300 (x334) or via e-mail at emergencyservices@qualityforum.org.

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