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 societies are going to put in the time and resources to develop a measure, our physician members want to know that this investment is actually going to help and be relevant to patient care. If you are going to do the work of measurement, make it count.
One organization has heard this message loud and clear. As the nation’s resource for quality measurement, the National Quality Forum (NQF) is addressing physician concerns about measuring what matters on multiple fronts. NQF’s role is to review quality measures through a rigorous, independent, transparent, evidence-based process and endorse only those measures that all stakeholders—including physicians—agree are the best for use in the private and public sectors. NQF also provides the federal government with critically important annual guidance and recommendations on measures that should be included or excluded in Medicare and Medicaid. Because NQF trains an ever-vigilant eye on the entire quality measurement horizon, it is uniquely positioned to prioritize the measures we should use to improve patient care, to identify and reduce measures of lesser value, and to align and harmonize the use of good measures across care settings, payers, physicians, and other clinicians. In doing so, NQF is working to reduce the administrative burden of reporting on quality measures and help the health care community measure what matters to improve patient outcomes.
At a time when the specialty societies are delving deeper into measure development and need NQF’s expertise and technical assistance more than ever, NQF’s future is in jeopardy. Unless Congress acts, the annually authorized mandatory $30 million invested in the nation’s quality measurement work and NQF will expire. As Ashish Jha so eloquently expressed in his post to the New England Journal of Medicine’s Catalyst blog: poorly constructed, unscientific quality measures are costly and unhelpful. NQF “stands out as central to getting the national quality agenda back on track.”
Now is not the time to back away from our commitment to quality. Now is the time, when so much of health care is uncertain, for us to stand firm in our commitment to patients and improving the care they receive. We therefore call on Congress to authorize and appropriate these necessary funds to allow the NQF to continue its important work.
The AAFP, AAP, ACP, and AOA are organizational members of NQF.
from Health Affairs BlogHealth Affairs Blog http://ift.tt/2fiTZQE
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