National Health Quality Roadmap

07.21.2020 · Eric Musser, Deputy Director, State Affairs, NCQA

Between July and December 2019, HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan convened a series of meetings with government and private sector quality experts to address Executive Order 13877, Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First. NCQA President, Peggy O’Kane, was pleased to serve on that Quality Summit .

As a result of the summit, HHS released its National Health Quality Roadmap in March 2020.

There is clearly broad cross-sector support for advancing digital measurement to reduce burden on frontline providers. We invite you review the Roadmap for details, but here are a few points that will interest digital measurement enthusiasts:

• To the extent feasible, data collected to support quality measurement should be drawn from information produced as part of the typical clinical workflow and should be collected electronically.

• Build an infrastructure that allows providers to “report data once” in a standard format, permitting federal partners to repurpose data for multiple programmatic purposes.

• Develop a blueprint to rapidly accelerate the use of measures derived from entirely electronic data sources, with the goal of basing 80% of quality measures on electronic data sources by 2025. The blueprint will be a strategy for information exchange, data connectivity and leveraging standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-based application programming interfaces (API).

• Develop a blueprint to define data standards and datasets to streamline data abstraction, collection and reporting activities, to ensure that quality data is meaningful and timely.

Review HHS’ National Health Quality Roadmap and join us in the Community Forum to discuss advancement of digital measurement to reduce burden on frontline providers.

Eric Musser, Deputy Director, State Affairs, NCQA

Eric Musser is the Deputy Director of State Affairs at the National Committee for Quality Assurance. He works with state regulators, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other stakeholders to improve health care quality. Prior to joining NCQA, he was a health care administrator in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Eric holds a master's degree in public health from Emory University and a bachelor's degree in sociology and health policy administration from Penn State University.