| National Quality Forum Convenes Movement To Transform Healthcare
The National Quality Forum (NQF) has called for its
members to focus on achieving the National Priorities
Partnership’s blueprint for world-class, affordable healthcare,
the organization said.
NQF is the convening member of the National Priorities
Partnership – a coalition of 28 major national organizations
representing those who receive, pay for, deliver and evaluate
healthcare.
The partnership unveiled the most comprehensive agenda
of its kind to transform healthcare during a time of severe economic
strain by cutting waste and better investing resources to fundamentally
improve care, NQF said.
The NQF board of directors unanimously endorsed the set
of six cross-cutting priorities - patient and family engagement,
population health, safety, care coordination, palliative and
end-of-life care, and overuse.
"NQF revised and expanded its mission to include the
convening of the partnership because we believe that a collective
effort such as this will be crucial to the success of future healthcare
reform efforts," said William Roper, chair of the NQF board of
directors. "The partnership is about transforming healthcare from the
inside out."
"The priorities allow us to focus our collective efforts
around areas that have the greatest potential for substantial
improvements," said Janet Corrigan, NQF president and CEO. "But setting
the priorities is just the first step. The harder part is still to come
– taking real actions, even if they are difficult, to achieve the
ambitious goals set by the partnership."
Collectively, NQF members have made significant
contributions to rethinking the way care is coordinated across
providers and settings, with the anticipation that "care coordination"
would be one of the priorities, NQF said.
NQF said it recently initiated a consensus project that
will help to improve the coordination of healthcare through endorsed
practices and performance measures that encourage shared accountability
across providers and systems.
NQF said it has also worked to identify gaps in its
portfolio where additional measures are needed to gauge progress in
achieving the ambitious goals. Within the next year, NQF said it plans
to conduct additional consensus projects to address measurement gaps
and will consider existing measures for endorsement and stimulate
measure development in areas where they are needed.
Through endorsement and harmonization activities, NQF
can help to align the measurement systems used to assess progress
toward achieving the priorities and goals.
Address: National Quality Forum, 601 13th St. NW, Suite 500 North, Washington DC 20005; (202) 783-1300, www.qualityforum.org.
|
