Dr Christine K. Cassel Talks Evolution of Standardized Healthcare Quality Measures

Since the National Quality Forum (NQF)’s birth in 1999, there have been 2 significant changes in the use of standardized healthcare quality measures: increased demand for information by all parties in the health system and growth in payment as it pertains to measurements and value, explains Christine K. Cassel, MD, president and chief executive officer of NQF.

However, the challenge that comes with the proliferation of measures is that care no longer simply entails hospitals and doctors; Dr Cassel adds that care is a whole range of differing systems that makes evaluating each system and communicating from one part to the next even more so difficult.

“One of the things NQF has been devoting a lot of effort to is what we call alignment, bringing all of these measures together to make it possible to collect the data once, report the data once and use it for multiple purposes,” Dr Cassel says.