Solving the challenges of developing standardized performance measures in an electronic format was the topic on hand at the "Best Practices in eMeasure Implementation" meeting held on April 26 at National Quality Forum's Washington, D.C. headquarters.

The meeting was a chance for stakeholders—including measure developers, health IT vendors, clinicians and quality improvement organizations—to share knowledge on the development and implementation of electronic measures, or eMeasures, across all domains of health care.

eMeasures can promote greater consistency in measure development and in measuring and comparing performance results, according to the NQF, and the federal government is embracing it as a less-burdensome approach to gathering and publicly reporting performance information. Because of this, federal contractors and other measure developers are attempting to retool existing quality measures into an electronic format, but how best to implement these eMeasures remains a big challenge, says NQF.
Participants in Thursday's meeting spoke of the unique opportunity to hear from the important players in the industry and commented that all the right groups were in attendance to have the discussion of how to make electronic measurement work.

"We're really enjoying the fact that there's going to be an ongoing collaboration involving everyone in the quality measurement enterprise, and we're excited," remarked Dr. Paul Tang, chair of NQF's Health Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Dr. Kate Goodrich, senior technical advisor in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service's Office of Clinical Standards and Quality, gave a keynote address and spoke of the Centers' "Three-Part Aim," which entails better health for the population, better care for individuals and lower cost through improvement.

"These aims are what drives CMS, and over time you'll see that all of our measurement strategies address this three-part aim."

Goodrich said the Affordable Care Act asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services to create a National Quality Strategy, which adopted the three-part aim and identified six priorities to improving quality care, including making care safer and engaging patients and their families as partners in their care.

She explained that CMS also has a variety of quality reporting and performance programs, such as hospital quality, physician quality reporting, and payment model reporting, and gave direction where CMS is headed in the future.

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