National Quality Forum: Blumenthal puts quality reporting at apex of meaningful use
Reported by Mary Mosquera of Government Health IT on October 15, 2009, from the National Quality Forum conference, “National health IT coordinator David Blumenthal emphasized today that the ability of clinicians to amass, analyze and report healthcare quality measures lays at the heart of his office’s strategy for using IT to transform the U.S. healthcare system.”  Mosquera further reported ”The aim is to take existing quality measures and convert them into metrics that can be incorporated into electronic health records in a standard form so they can be compared across practices and geography, he (Blumenthal) said.”

National Quality Forum
“The mission of the National Quality Forum (NQF) is to improve 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, a nonprofit organization (qualityforum.org) with diverse stakeholders across the public and private health sectors, was established in 1999 and is based in Washington, DC.”

ONC and its committees have used NQF metrics in their development of “meaningful use” measures, and are working with NQF to develop additional measures which have not yet been set.

NQF Conference Spotlights Quality Imperative in Healthcare Reform
National Quality Forum’s (NQF) 10th Annual Conference “Beyond Measure: The Quality Imperative in Healthcare Reform”  assembled hundreds of healthcare leaders just outside Washington, DC on October 14-15, 2009.
NQF Press Release
NQF Annual Conference Agenda
NQF Annual Conference Adenda (pdf)