Quality Reporting Measures

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has announced a $200,000 challenge for developers to create game applications that help generate “useful” healthcare quality data, the organization announced this week. This is the foundation’s second major competition in its Aligning Forces initiative for Quality (AF4Q), an initiative to improve the quality of healthcare in various targeted communities across the country, while providing models of reform.

With the rapid adoption of audiovisual technology into healthcare, healthcare CIOs and other healthcare IT leaders face the difficult decision of how to balance their organizations’ investment dollars against budgetary constraints, security, and selection of technology that is appropriate to the provider organization’s IT infrastructure. At a roundtable discussion, “Balancing Innovation, Budget Constraints, and Network Security,” part of the Technology Crossroads Conference that was put on by the National eHealth Collaborative in Washington, D.C., last week, expert panelists discussed wide-raging topics confronting provider organizations against the backdrop of the fast-changing technology landscape, including technology investments, cost pressures, health information exchange, network security, cloud computing, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The Office for the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has released the beta version of certification tool, Cypress, which tests EHRs and EHR modules in calculating Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 2 Clinical Quality Measures (CQMs). ONC says its certification program "provides a defined process" to ensure certificated EHRs meet the adopted standards and criteria of meaningful use.

CHIME members voiced their concern this week with congressional proposals to “immediately suspend” EHR incentive payments. In an Oct. 4 letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI-4), Energy & Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI-6), Ways & Means Health Subcommittee Chair Wally Herger (R-CA-2) and Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee Chair Joe Pitts (R-PA-16) voice concern that the incentive payments were being wasted because many providers continue to lack interoperability.

What is the way to success in a high-intensity primary care program aimed at improving quality and lowering costs for a sub-set of patients with chronic conditions? It comes through increased patient and physician engagement, according to the results of a recent study by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) for the nonpartisan, nonprofit National Institute for Health Care Reform (NIHCR).