OFMQ Selected To Develop First Ever Quality Measures for Hospital Outpatient Settings
Collaborates with The Joint Commission to Accelerate Research and Testing
Oklahoma City, OK (July 12, 2007) – Oklahoma Foundation for Medical Quality (OFMQ) will develop the first national standardized quality measures to assess performance in hospital outpatient facilities, in a new contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The Joint Commission, the nation’s predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in health care, will collaborate with OFMQ in this initiative. The measures will be used by CMS for public reporting, performance-based financial incentives, and quality improvement.
The Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 provides for the development of measures to assess the quality of care furnished by hospital outpatient settings, which may include emergency rooms, hospital-affiliated clinics, and ambulatory surgery facilities. Adding performance measures for the hospital outpatient setting is part of the continual trend toward transparency in health care, making information on quality and cost available to the public.
“We are pleased to contribute our expertise in such a significant way to health care quality improvement,” said Claudette Greenway, RN, MBA, and Chief Operations Officer at OFMQ. “Part of our role is to facilitate collaboration among experts to ensure appropriate and effective measurement. We appreciate working in concert with The Joint Commission to establish consensus-based measures,” she said.
"The Joint Commission welcomes the opportunity to formally collaborate on measure development with Oklahoma Foundation for Medical Quality,” said Jerod M. Loeb, PhD, The Joint Commission's Executive Vice President for Quality Measurement and Research. “This project is a critical component in the evolving national performance measurement landscape,” he said.
Under the contract, OFMQ will collaborate with the Joint Commission to develop the technical specifications and conduct feasibility testing for an initial set of ten measures to be released this summer. These measures were prioritized from a list of CMS-proposed measures based on several criteria, including their importance to quality performance, usefulness to consumers and purchasers in decision making, and feasibility of data collection.
“We like to see alignment with existing measures that have proven to be effective,” said Dale Bratzler, DO, MPH, QIOSC Medical Director for OFMQ. “We’re looking at populations and conditions that we can easily identify and where opportunity for improvement exists, such as in heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical infection. Improving quality of care in these areas has the potential to impact millions of Americans,” he added.
Inpatient hospitals have publicly reported performance data on heart and pneumonia care since 2004, and in 2006 added measures for surgical infection prevention. In other contracts with CMS, OFMQ leads development and support for quality improvement measures and interventions used on a national scale for pneumonia, surgical care, heart attack, and heart failure.
Updated 09/26/07: The Measures Specifications Manual is posted on CMS' Website. Scroll down to the Downloads section.