CHICAGO -- The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), two organizations at the center of a national push to improve health care data collection and reporting, testified before the American Health Information Community (AHIC) Quality Workgroup on specific "challenges that need to be addressed in the industry-wide drive to advance quality patient care." The testimony of both organizations was based on findings from "Collecting and Reporting Data for Performance Measurement: Moving Toward Alignment," an AHIMA and MGMA joint report funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

"The healthcare community acknowledges the importance of standardizing performance measures to improve healthcare quality and efficiency. However, little attention has been devoted to the specific problems surrounding how the data for these measures are to be acquired, by whom, and at what cost," said MGMA President and Chief Executive Officer William Jessee, MD, FACMPE.

The proliferation of national, state and local performance measurement data collection and reporting initiatives create significant challenges for physicians and health care organizations. These uncoordinated and often conflicting demands for data contribute to the already limited financial, staffing, and technological resources of many health care providers.
However, emerging health information technology has great potential to vastly improve the quality and safety of patient care. Yet, when automated, the extraction of data remains challenging due to variations in performance measurement requirements and the lack of broadly accepted standards for data content. These variations have a negative impact on the abilities of providers to report and use accurate and timely data about their performance.

AHIMA Chief Executive Officer Linda Kloss, MA, RHIA, CAE, said the joint report "represents the best thinking of all the organizations about data collection and reporting that rises to the fiduciary requirements-including cost, quality and safety-placed upon healthcare by America's healthcare recipients."

The report is the outcome of AHRQ's National Conference on Health Care Data Collection and Reporting which took place in November 2006. More than 50 of the nation's most influential health care leaders, from both public and private stakeholder organizations, met in Chicago with AHRQ, AHIMA and MGMA to discuss approaches to current problems related to performance measurement reporting.

Both leaders stressed an urgency to develop a standardized set of core performance measurements while resolving data collection, aggregation, and reporting issues as soon as possible.

AHIC formed the Quality Workgroup after it identified and prioritized several health information technology areas that could produce a specific tangible value to health care consumers. The panel was given both broad and specific charges to support breakthroughs in health information technology that provide data needed for the development of useful quality measures.

For more information or to view the report, visit http://healthit.ahrq.gov/portal/server.pt/gateway/PTARGS_0_1248_227079_0_0_18/AHRQ_DataReport_final.pdf.

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