National Quality Forum Announces Publication of New Report on Home Health Care Performance Standards
Posted on: Wednesday, 26 October 2005, 12:01 CDT
WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Quality Forum (NQF) today announced publication of a new set of national consensus standards for home care. National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Home Health Care provides a set of standardized performance measures, to facilitate comparison of the quality of home health care providers. The Executive Summary of the report, with a list of endorsed performance measures and their specifications, can be found on the NQF web site, http://www.qualityforum.org/.
The report details measures endorsed by NQF's more than 270 Member organizations through its formal Consensus Development Process. As such, the measures have special legal standing as voluntary consensus standards. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will report data from these measures for nearly 7,000 Medicare certified home health care agencies on its Home Health Compare web site (http://www.medicare.gov/HHCompare/home.asp).
"The old saying that 'there is no place like home' is increasingly relevant in healthcare today. More than 4 million patients currently receive home care services, and that number is steadily increasing," said Kenneth W. Kizer, MD, MPH, President and CEO of the NQF. "Improving the outcomes of care provided by the approximately 20,000 home care agencies would have significant public health benefit."
The set includes 15 measures that facilitate efforts to achieve higher levels of patient safety and better outcomes for patients. These measures are intended for public reporting. Consumers can use these publicly reported consensus standards to compare home health care providers to each other. Additionally, the consensus standards may be used by home health care providers themselves for internal benchmarking activities to gauge where to target quality improvement projects.
The 15 measures are, in brief: 1. Improvement in ambulation/locomotion 2. Improvement in bathing 3. Improvement in transferring 4. Improvement in management of oral medications 5. Improvement in pain interfering with activity 6. Improvement in status of surgical wounds 7. Improvement in dyspnea 8. Improvement in urinary incontinence 9. Increase in number of pressure ulcers 10. Emergent care for wound infections, deteriorating wound status 11. Emergent care for improper medication administration, medication side effects 12. Emergent care for hypo/hyperglycemia 13. Acute care hospitalization 14. Discharge to community 15. Emergent care
NQF has endorsed voluntary consensus standards that apply to a variety of care settings, including inpatient acute care hospitals, ambulatory (outpatient) care, and nursing home care. "Increasingly, the healthcare community is recognizing the benefit of standardized performance measurement and public reporting," Kizer said.
Support for this project was provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
NQF is a voluntary consensus standard-setting organization. It is a private, not-for-profit, public benefit corporation established in 1999 to standardize healthcare quality measurement and reporting. Established as a unique public-private partnership, NQF has broad participation from all sectors of the healthcare industry. Visit NQF on the web at http://www.qualityforum.org/.
National Quality Forum
CONTACT: Philip Dunn of National Quality Forum, +1-202-783-0206; orJerry Mullins, +1-202-261-4037, for National Quality Forum
Web site: http://www.qualityforum.org/http://www.medicare.gov/HHCompare
Source: PRNewswire
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