AHRQ published their “Request for Information (RFI) “Quality Measurement Enabled by Health IT” in the July 20th Federal Register. AHRQ is looking for ideas on how to improve quality measurements through health IT from stakeholders, health IT developers, vendors, payers, quality measure developers, end users, clinicians, and healthcare consumers
AHRQ wants to develop further insight in order to achieve meaningful advancements in the next generation of quality measurement. Through this RFI, AHRQ seeks information on building blocks of health IT-enabled quality measurement in terms of practicalities and priorities. So far, developing quality measures has generally been based on developing the measures from paper chart information, from manual charts, abstracting information, and analyzing claims data. Health IT-enabled quality measurement is an emerging field.
However, challenges hindering the process can involve:
- Underdeveloped or unavailable infrastructure
- Incompleteness of the measure set and to prevent developing measures that matter to consumers
- Knowing how to capture unstructured data in the EHR
Comments are to be submitted by August 20, 2012. AHRQ will host a national web conference July 31 at 1:30 pm to provide additional information on the project and the report “Environmental Snapshot—Quality Measurement Enabled by Health IT: Overview, Possibilities, and Challenges”.
Go to http://healthit.ahrq.gov/HealthITEnabledQuality%20Measurement/Snapshot.pdf to view the report published under contract by Booz Allen Hamilton (July 20, 2012).
For more information, email Angela Nunley at Armela.Nunley@AHRQ,hhs,giv or call (301) 427-1505.
