The National Quality Forum (NQF) has 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 healthcare 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, 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 healthcare agencies on its Home Health Compare Web site, www.medicare.gov/HHCompare.

"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 healthcare providers to each other. Additionally, the consensus standards may be used by home healthcare 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.

Source: National Quality Forum