At a conference sponsored by the National Quality Forum on Thursday, National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal said health care providers' ability to collect, analyze and report quality measures is central to his office's health IT strategy, Government Health IT reports.
He said, "The key to meaningful use is to know how to measure for performance and to be able to give feedback to providers."
Under the federal stimulus package, health care providers who demonstrate "meaningful use" of electronic health records will be eligible for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments beginning in 2011.
Blumenthal said the goal is to convert existing quality measures into standard metrics that can be incorporated into EHRs and compared across practices and areas. He noted that the National Quality Forum is revamping some existing quality measures for EHR use.
Paul Tang -- chief medical information officer of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and vice chair of the Health IT Policy Committee -- said that health care providers will have to submit quality measures to CMS to comply with meaningful use requirements. He said, "Just the act of measuring will continuously cause us to improve" (Mosquera, Government Health IT, 10/15).