According to the IOM, a small set of core metrics will help focus measurement on critical national goals and help track progress toward higher quality care, better health, and lower costs at the national, state, and local level.
“U.S. health care costs and expenditures are the highest in the world, but health outcomes and the quality of care are below average by many measures,” said David Blumenthal, M.D., president of the Commonwealth Fund, and chair of the IOM committee that developed the metrics recommendations. “If we want to know how effective and efficient our health expenditures are in order to improve health and lower costs, we need to measure the most crucial health outcomes to guide our choices and gauge impact. The proposed core set focuses on the most powerful measures that have the greatest potential to positively affect the health and well-being of Americans.”
The IOM calls for “strong stewardship” by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “refine, standardize and implement core measures throughout the nation,” and underscores the importance of a multistakeholder, participatory process, such as that carried out by NQF. The IOM recommends that such a multistakeholder process be undertaken to refine the individual measure elements for each of the recommended core metrics, and calls for NQF to use the core measures in its efforts to prioritize and align measures around the report’s shared goals.
“The IOM report is the latest evidence of an intensifying national effort to better leverage quality measurement to drive healthcare improvement,” said NQF President and CEO, Christine K. Cassel, MD. “In light of the recently announced Department of Health and Human Services quality goals, the newly launched Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network, and bipartisan congressional support of quality legislation, the quality movement is poised to get more performance out of performance measurement transformation.”
