National multistakeholder group calls for five actions to mobilize true
change
WASHINGTON, May 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Expanding health
insurance coverage is a critical step in health reform, but reforms will
not be successful if they fail to also address the quality and cost of
care.
That is the conclusion of The Quality Crossroads Group, a broad group
of stakeholders drawn together to identify strategies to address the
complex challenges confronting the U.S. health care system. The group lays
out a five-point agenda in an article published today in Health Affairs
that serves as a vision for quality in an election year when patient
safety, the plight of the uninsured, and rising costs are making front-page
news.
"Quality improvement is intricately connected with containing costs and
expanding coverage. Yet too often, quality is left out of the equation,"
says co-author Margaret E. O'Kane, president of the National Committee for
Quality Assurance. "Poor quality care is a major contributor to runaway
health care costs. Improving quality is a key part of making coverage
affordable."
"The future of health care reform rests on the ability for diverse
groups, at national, state, and community levels, to work to achieve
consensus. We cannot achieve the important policy goals outlined in this
paper without collaboration," says co-author Janet Corrigan, president and
CEO of the National Quality Forum. "The thinking in this paper, by leaders
in the quality movement across the country, represents a successful effort
to collaborate in moving beyond rhetoric and sparking real change," she
added.
If taken up by the new President, Congress and others, the five-point
reform plan put forward by the 13 authors of the paper would mobilize true
change in the nation's vast, complicated, and expensive health care system.
The reform plan calls for:
-- A national center to support effectiveness research. The U.S. invests
too little in understanding what works and what does not for a whole
array of technologies, drugs, and treatments. In order to ensure that
our health care dollars are wisely spent, we need to systematically
identify where critical gaps in evidence exist and fill them.
-- Models of accountable health care entities capable of providing
integrated and coordinated care. The sickest patients often suffer the
most from lack of care coordination across settings. They see multiple
specialists, get an array of tests, and take multiple medications -
usually without a "health care home" or central coordinator of
care. Achieving high levels of coordination will require investments in
organizational supports that go beyond information technology. IT is a
critical enabler of management, but is not sufficient to produce
high-quality, efficient, and patient-centered care.
-- Payment models that reward high-value care. There are nearly 10,000
codes for payment for medical procedures, but not one for outcomes or
results. The Quality Crossroads Group believes that if quality is not
tied to payment, providers' behavior will not appreciably change,
and if it does not change, access to insurance and care will continue to
decline. We need to aggressively develop models of payment that reward
clinically effective and efficient care and yield high patient
satisfaction. Those might include innovative ideas like bundled chronic
care episodes.
-- A national strategy for performance measurement, including standardized
measures of patient and population health. We need a common vision of
what quality care means. To get there, we need to agree on what we are
measuring and how we are measuring it. Performance information is a
public good and federal funding for the National Quality Forum, a
private sector standard-setting organization, will facilitate
development of a comprehensive portfolio of standardized measures that
is continually assessed and updated.
-- A multistakeholder approach to improving population health. Obesity is
a national crisis that demands solutions that lie mostly outside of
health care. The public sector can do much to promote population health.
For example, in Arkansas, nearly 38 percent of young people are
overweight or at risk of becoming overweight. State officials
implemented a strategy to target children in schools, focusing on what
they eat and how often they exercise. We must make a concerted public-
and private-sector effort -- similar to the one we mounted for tobacco
control -- to achieve the outcomes we know are possible.
Read "Crossroads in Quality" in Health Affairs, Vol. 27., No 3.
About NQF. The mission of the National Quality Forum
(http://www.qualityforum.org) is to improve the quality of American health care 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 non-profit organization
(qualityforum.org) with diverse stakeholders across the public and private
health sectors, was established in 1999 and is based in Washington, DC.
About NCQA. NCQA (http://www.ncqa.org) is a private, non-profit organization
dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a
wide range of health care organizations and recognizes physicians in key
clinical areas. NCQA's Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set
(HEDIS(R)) is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health
care. NCQA is committed to providing health care quality information
through the Web, media and data licensing agreements in order to help
consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices.
About The Quality Crossroads Group. Corrigan and O'Kane convened the
Quality Crossroads Group in 2006 in a unique effort to build consensus for
policy goals that are too often held hostage by partisan politics. In
addition to Corrigan and O'Kane, Quality Crossroads Group members are:
Sandra Foote, Senior Vice President and Principal, CapitolHealth; Sean
Tunis, Director, Center for Medical Technology Policy; George Isham,
Medical Director and Chief Health Officer, HealthPartners; Len Nichols,
Director, Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation; Elliott
Fisher, Professor, Dartmouth Medical School and Director of the Center for
Healthcare Research and Reform, Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and
Clinical Practice; Jack Ebeler, President, Ebeler Consulting; James Block,
Senior Hospital Consultant, Center to Advance Palliative Care; Bruce
Bradley, Director, Public Policy and Strategy--Healthcare Initiative,
General Motors Corporation; Christine Cassel, President and CEO, American
Board of Internal Medicine and ABIM Foundation; Debra Ness, President,
National Partnership for Women and Families; and John Tooker, Executive
Vice President and CEO, American College of Physicians.
SOURCE National Quality Forum
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Related links:
http://www.ncqa.org
http://www.qualityforum.org
CONTACT:
Stacy Fiedler of NQF, +1-202-783-1300,
press@qualityforum.org; or Lauren Funk of NCQA, +1-202-955-1705,
funk@ncqa.org
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