TORONTO, April 22, 2010 -- Increasing the use of quality measurement as part of electronic health records (EHR) systems is critical to achieving meaningful use of health information technology, the American College of Physicians (ACP) reported in a paper released today at the 129,000-member organization's annual meeting.
EHR-Based Quality Measurement and Reporting—Critical for Meaningful Use and Health Care Improvement, says that using EHRs as the basis for quality measurement systems would allow for a more complete reflection of care processes and patient outcomes. Ultimately, this would result in a more clinically useful set of quality data.
"Physician practices face significant financial and work-flow barriers to EHR adoption," said Joseph W. Stubbs, MD, FACP, President, ACP. "With the promise that could come from better quality measurement, it is critical that we provide physicians with the support necessary to acquire these systems."
In order to take full advantage of the benefits that EHRs could offer for quality measurement and reporting procedures ACP believes that:
- The primary purpose of EHR-based quality measurement and reporting should be to facilitate higher-quality, cost-effective health care.
- In order for an EHR-based quality measurement and reporting program to engage all health care stakeholders, it must use clinically relevant measures and be accurate and trusted by a full range of stakeholders, particularly patients, physicians, and other health care providers.
- Data to support EHR-based quality measurement and reporting should rely upon information routinely collected during the course of providing clinical care, including relevant data supplied by patients.
- EHR-based quality measurement should begin with the goal of facilitating the real-time collection of data that support the effective use of point-of-care clinical decision support algorithms.
- EHR-based quality measurement and reporting must not increase administrative work and/or impose uncompensated financial costs upon physicians and other health care providers, health care organizations, or patients.
- Data elements that comprise quality measure data sets should be defined in a standard way to enable health IT developers to implement them effectively.
- ACP supports the commitment of the HIT Standards Committee, the National Quality Forum (NQF), the NQF Health Information Technology Expert Panel (HITEP), Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and others to develop unified standards for structured, codified data elements, calculation logic, measure structure, and reporting structure for quality measures. The development of these standards requires concerted and consistent input from all health care stakeholders.
"Physicians using EHRs for effective quality measurement face significant implementation barriers. The challenge to making this happen is ensuring that EHRs are capable of reporting clinical outcomes and measures, and that physician offices have the necessary financial and workforce resources," concluded Dr. Stubbs. "However, the benefits that improved quality measurement could have for patient care would be tremendous."
About the American College of Physicians
The American College of Physicians is the largest medical specialty organization and the second-largest physician group in the United States. ACP members include 129,000 internal medicine physicians (internists), related subspecialists, and medical students. Internists specialize in the prevention, detection, and treatment of illness in adults.