National Quality Forum

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The National Quality Forum (NQF) is a multistakeholder, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of American healthcare by setting national priorities and goals for performance improvement, endorsing national consensus standards for measuring and publicly reporting on performance, and promoting the attainment of national goals through education and outreach programs. NQF is a private, not-for-profit membership organization with more than 375 members representing virtually every sector of the healthcare system.

Misson

NQF operates under a three-part mission to improve the quality of American healthcare by:

1. Setting national priorities and goals for performance improvement

2. Endorsing national consensus standards for measuring and publicly reporting on performance

3. Promoting the attainment of national goals through education and outreach programs


Why Measure Quality?

Performance measures give us a way to assess healthcare against recognized standards. While measures come from many sources, those endorsed by the National Quality Forum have become a common point of reference. An NQF endorsement reflects rigorous scientific and evidence-based review, input from patients and their families, and the perspectives of people throughout the healthcare industry. The science of measuring healthcare performance has made enormous progress over the last decade, and it continues to evolve. Measures represent a critical component in the national endeavor to assure all patients of appropriate and high-quality care.

History

In a report issued in 1998, the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry proposed creation of NQF as part of an integrated national quality improvement agenda. Leaders from consumer, purchaser, provider, health plan, and health service research organizations met as the Quality Forum Planning Committee throughout 1998 and early 1999 to define the mission, structure, and financing of the National Quality Forum. The National Quality Forum officially launched on September 23, 1999.

Funding

NQF receives funding from both public and private sources, including grants from foundations, corporations, and the federal government. In recent years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have provided generous support for NQF. Other funders have included the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, the Cardinal Health Foundation, Pfizer Inc., Sanofi-aventis, and the Texas Medical Institute of Technology. Thirty-four percent of the organization’s total funding comes directly from membership dues.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) awarded a contract to NQF that provides $10 million for fiscal 2009 with the option for renewal each year through 2012, and is being administrated through DHHS’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.

Governance & Leadership

NQF’s work is overseen by its Board of Directors, whose three major Board Committees guide the organization’s actions on matters related to specific elements of NQF’s mission. In addition, eight NQF Member Councils serve in an advisory capacity to the Board of Directors and its standing committees.

Topics & Sample Initiatives

NQF conducts its work around eight topic areas. The first six topics correspond with the Priorities identified by the National Priorities Partnership in 2008 as those with the most potential to result in substantial improvements in health and healthcare. The two additional Topics, HIT and Disparities, are noted by the Partnership as cutting across each of the six Priorities. Addressing these two additional areas along with the six Priorities will be instrumental in improving healthcare quality.

Patient Safety

NQF has published a number of reports to encourage providers to adopt best practices and eliminate serious reportable events (SREs).

State based reporting has been enacted in 26 states and the District of Columbia to help providers identify and learn from serious reportable events.

The Patient Safety Measures project seeks to identify and endorse cross-cutting patient safety measures across conditions, populations, and settings of care.

Population Health

NQF undertook an effort to achieve voluntary consensus on performance measures for immunizations to prevent seasonal influenza and pneumococcal disease across healthcare settings in the United States.

Care Coordination

NQF's Preferred Practices and Performance Measures for Measuring and Reporting Care Coordination project sought to endorse a set of preferred practices and performance measures in care coordination that are applicable across all settings of care.

With the National Voluntary Consensus Standards For Hospital Care: Outcomes and Efficiency projects, NQF seeks to endorse measures of hospital outcomes that reach outside of the hospital walls. These could include measures of quality of the hospital transition, improvement in health-related quality of life, palliative care symptom control, and surgical outcomes.

Patient and Family Engagement

The National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Home Health Care project resulted in 15 standardized measures to assess the quality of home healthcare in the United States.

A projects in 2008 reviewed the measures for home health performance and added new ones.

Palliative and End-of-Life Care

In 2006, NQF endorsed a palliative care and hospice framework which provides a foundation for quality measurement and reporting systems in these areas.

Beginning in 2011, NQF seeks to identify and endorse measures for public reporting and quality improvement addressing quality of care for patients receiving palliative and/or end-of-life care. Review of standards relating to end-of-life care undergoing maintenance will also be conducted in this project.

Overuse

An Imaging Efficiency Standards project identified and endorsed measures for public reporting and quality improvement related to resource use and care coordination for hospital outpatient imaging.

Health Information Technology (HIT)

Disparities