National Quality Forum (NQF) measures and standards serve as a critically important foundation for initiatives to enhance healthcare value, make patient care safer, and achieve better outcomes. Created in 1999, NQF is the only consensus-based healthcare organization in the nation as defined by the Office of Management and Budget. This status allows the federal government to rely on NQF-defined measures or healthcare practices as the best, evidence-based approaches to improving care. The federal government, states, and private-sector organizations use NQF’s endorsed measures, which must meet rigorous criteria, to evaluate performance and share information with patients and their families. Have you considered membership or assigned participation aligned with a role within your organization? We, at PCLLC, look to them and aligning with a non-bias delivery of information for you to consider as the plan, do, study or act upon approach.
Learn more about the overview and goals within their Strategic Plan for Achieving the Care We Need. Their Five Year Strategic Plan speaks to the “Healthcare Ecosystem” and the health that encompasses their mission, organization and people. The goals align with what many facilities and providers face. Work with the NQF helps define roles and those affects on one another.
Additionally, National Quality Forum (NQF) uses its formal Consensus Development Process (CDP) to evaluate and endorse measures. The CDP is designed to allow input and discussion from stakeholder groups across the healthcare industry.
The CDP or measure endorsement process, including maintenance of previously endorsed measures, is standardized in a regular cycle of topic-based measure evaluation across 15 areas, such as cardiology, primary care and chronic illness, cancer, and prevention and population health. As the need arises, these topic areas are updated to account for measures that may require a new or more appropriate topic area.
NQF-endorsed measures support the National Quality Strategy (NQS). NQS serves as the overarching framework for guiding and aligning public and private efforts across all levels (local, state, and national) to improve the quality of healthcare in the U.S. The NQS establishes the “triple aim” of better care, affordable care, and healthy people/communities, focusing on six priorities to achieve those aims: Safety, Person- and Family- Centered Care, Communication and Care Coordination, Effective Prevention and Treatment of Illness, Best Practices for Healthy Living, and Affordable Care.
Over the past 15 years, NQF’s CDP has evolved to ensure that evaluation of candidate consensus standards (measures) continues to follow best practices in performance measurement and standards-setting. NQF is committed to examining the timeliness, efficiency, and effectiveness of the CDP with a view toward identifying opportunities to improve and further streamline the CDP.
NQF’s CDP involves six principal steps, including:
- Intent to Submit
- Call for Nominations
- Measure Review
- Public Commenting with Member Support
- Measure Endorsement
- Measure Appeals
NQF is a voluntary consensus standards body as defined by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-119.
Funding for this work is supported under a contract provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. For information about the availability of auxiliary aids and services for NQF’s federally funded projects, please visit: http://www.medicare.gov/about-us/nondiscrimination/nondiscrimination-notice.html.
