NQF issues quality data standards for electronic records
By Mary Mosquera
Thursday, November 12, 2009
The National Quality Forum has published a standard set of clinical data elements to measure quality performance that electronic health records should be able to capture across all care settings.
It will make it easier to compare healthcare providers’ reports on their performance in quality measures, said Dr. Paul Tang, chairman of NQF’s Health IT Expert Panel that drafted the data set.
By providing a common language to describe the information within quality measures, the Quality Data Set enables quality measurement from a variety of electronic sources, including electronic health records, personal health records, registries and health information exchanges.
Tang, who is also the vice chairman of the Health IT Policy Committee, a public-private panel that advises the national health IT coordinator, told Government Health IT that the committee may consider the Quality Data Set for future meaningful use recommendations.
"An electronic health record [system] would be certified to contain data elements in the Quality Data Set to be used in meaningful use measures," Tang said.
The data set framework consists of standard elements or a code list for a specific condition such as diabetes; quality data elements or information describing the context of use such as a past history of diabetes; and data flow attributes or the care setting providing the information.
"Providing a common data resource for all stakeholders in the quality-measures supply chain will allow us to align our efforts and improve the comparability of quality reports while dramatically reducing the burden of quality measurement," Tang said.
Providers have collected and reported their healthcare performance data largely through a manual process. With the Quality Data Set, measure developers will now have common data definitions and conventions to use when specifying measures for electronic health records, said Janet Corrigan, NQF president and CEO.
This work was conducted under a contract from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
