Ambulatory Care Quality Standards Get Green Light

The National Quality Forum's board of directors recently endorsed a set of national consensus standards for gauging and voluntarily reporting the quality of ambulatory care, giving its stamp of approval to 36 standardized performance measures.

"NQF is a national organization charged with endorsing quality measures that can be used by all health plans nationwide," said Bruce Bagley, M.D., AAFP's medical director of quality improvement and a member of the NQF steering committee. "A common set of measures is a key goal, and this is a big step in the right direction."

The approved performance measures are split into seven health care categories. Those categories are:

The NQF board also approved recommendations for a purpose statement, guiding principl for implementation and additional implementation considerations.

An NQF spokesperson said specifications for the measures are to be published this fall. Once the specifications are available, members should start using them, said Bagley. "If physicians start collecting data on these measures as soon as possible, they'll have the data in hand, ready to report, when a payer wants to implement a pay-for-performance program six months down the road," he said.

According to an Aug.4 NQF press release (PDF file: 3 pages / 111 KB. More about PDFs.), the new standards represent consensus among more than 260 health care providers, consumer groups, professional associations, purchasers, federal agencies, and research and quality improvement organizations.

The standards are part of NQF's Standardizing Ambulatory Care Performance Measures project, an initiative charged with expeditiously identifying a set of ambulatory care standards from measures submitted by the AMA Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement's Physician Performance Measures set, CMS' Doctor's Office Quality Project and the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

The quality measures approved by NQF dovetail with those endorsed by the Ambulatory care Quality Alliance, as reported in a previous AAFP News Now story, "AAFP, Other Stakeholders Endorse 'Starter Set' of Performance Measures." The AAFP is a member of the alliance.