Making Measurement Count: The Importance of NQF

Physicians today have a love-hate relationship with quality performance measurement. We know we need quality measures, but measurement also can add administrative complexity. We want to make sure that the measures get us to our number one goal of improving patient care. Together, our organizations represent approximately 500,000 of the nation’s more than 800,000 practicing physicians. While each organization has a different clinical focus: family medicine, pediatrics, osteopathic medicine, internal medicine and psychiatry, we are united in our commitment to provide better, safer care for our patients. Quality measures are the tools we use across the health care system to assess physician performance and improve the care our patients receive. Increasingly over the past decade, health care payers in both the private and public sectors have increased physician accountability by tying quality measures to payment and public reporting programs. To be assessed fairly, each medical specialty needs valid, reliable, and relevant quality measures. With the proliferation of measures over the past decade, physicians across specialties have struggled with the burden of reporting, and had concerns that some measures did not accurately reflect their area of medical practice and were not contributing to improving patient care. By and large, however, physician specialty societies are relatively new to developing measures, particularly accountability or outcome measures. If specialty societie...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Health Professionals Organization and Delivery Quality National Quality Forum quality measures Source Type: blogs