NQF panel seeks comment on EHR quality measure specs

A National Quality Forum (NQF) committee focused on health IT is seeking comments on a draft data set for quality measurement in healthcare, saying that current quality measurement specifications are not designed to make use of EHRs and rely on administrative rather than clinical data.

NQF, an organization of health professional organizations, health delivery groups, government agencies, payers, business groups and other entities, has selected a number of sets of quality measures of care, some of which have become accepted as requirements through Medicare and other entities, reported Government Health IT.

The Health Information Technology Expert Panel (HITEP) has recommended priority performance measures for better electronic data capture of quality measures , which has been used by the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) and the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT).

According to Government Health IT, HITEP also suggested that NQF provide a starter set of EHR measurements of the meaningful use of health IT. Additionally, the panel called for the quality data set to be available on a public Web site and that it be regularly maintained and updated.

The report, which included an "environmental scan" of current efforts for using electronic clinical data for measuring quality conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton, noted that since quality measures cannot communicate with EHRs, personal health records, laboratory information systems and pharmacy benefit managers, much of the information is manually abstracted.

Comments on the "Health IT Enablement of Quality Measurement - the Quality Data Set (QDS) and Dataflow" draft are due by June 30.