Lumetra Healthcare Solutions

Lumetra recently joined with more than 130 organizations that advocate recommendations to the Obama administration and Congress to assure that quality measurement and improvement are central components of healthcare reform. This coalition, Stand for Quality, joins the energies of both public and private sectors to strengthen healthcare quality, ensuring reform not only expands coverage but also improves patient care. The coalition identifies distinct roles for the public and private sectors to work in partnership to measure quality and use those results to drive continuous improvement. Six recommendations, building on work already underway, will create an integrated infrastructure that will put information to inform their decisions in the hands of providers, purchasers, and consumers of healthcare.

1. We must improve quality in healthcare and make it more affordable. There are examples all over the country of high quality, affordable health care being delivered everyday. We need to create a health care system that builds on these examples to deliver care that is financially sustainable, high quality, patient-centered and satisfying to the millions of clinicians and others providing care.
2. Performance measurement is a core building block to provide high quality, affordable care. Information that is grounded in good evidence will support quality improvement, payment reform, and enable better clinical and consumer decision-making.
3. Public investments are needed to support the performance measurement, reporting, and improvement enterprise. This investment requires dedicated federal support that is not subject to political interference from special interests.
4. We should build upon the existing public-private performance measurement, reporting, and improvement enterprise. In recent years, vital public-private partnerships, such as the National Quality Forum and the Hospital Quality Alliance, have begun to establish a foundation and become essential to the performance measurement, reporting, and improvement enterprise.
5. Investment in Health Information Technology (HIT) should be linked to improving care. HIT can only help improve the quality of care if it is designed to more effectively collect performance information.
6. Performance measurement must be dramatically expanded, but measurement alone is not enough. Improvements in the quality and affordability of care will occur only when measurement information is actually used by clinicians and facilities.

I’d like to encourage you to join Stand for Quality and play a part in the reform of healthcare in America.