Enabling a Digital Quality System Vision:

www.ncqa.org December 2020 Enabling a Digital Quality System Vision: A scalable, sustainable digital quality infrastructure “utility” that enables reduced waste and burden in quality reporting; allows measurement across levels of the healthcare system; more accurately identifies high-value care; and enables a “learning health system” that leverages existing guidelines and clinical inputs to improv. [...] The Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®), the backbone of the measurement system, has revolutionized our ability to identify areas for improvement, drive that improvement and standardize expectations for high quality care. [...] Even physicians who attempt to coordinate and rationalize care are obstructed by the balkanization of data, the lack of a full picture of what is happening to their patients, and the inability to act effectively if care is not what it should be. [...] The best chance to accelerate adoption across parties is to demonstrate to regulators, developers, and users of quality measures how a uniform set of tools in a common, secure environment can facilitate better data flow and utilization for an array of quality efforts and entities. [...] The digital quality utility we envision aligns closely with the “secure, data-driven ecosystem to accelerate research and innovation” contemplated in the 2020–2025 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan and would support the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) goal of requiring all quality measures to be reported digitally by 2030.