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Patient Safety Measures

Call for Intent
November 2024

CALL FOR INTENT TO SUBMIT NEW STANDARDS
Patient Safety Measures

NQF is initiating a consensus development project seeking endorsement of measures for Patient Safety Measures

NOTICE TO MEASURE STEWARDS

If, after reviewing this Call for Intent, your organization believes it has one or more measures that address the scope and objectives of this project as described below and would like NQF to evaluate them for possible endorsement, please submit a call for intent to submit candidate standards by 07 December, 2009 to complete this process.

NQF has recently converted to electronic submission of materials. To submit your intent, log in with your NQF username and password and complete the form for each intended measure submission. If you have not created an NQF account, please follow the instructions on the log-in page.

BACKGROUND

In November 2008, the National Priorities Partnership (NPP) deemed Patient Safety as one of
the six national priorities, with specific focus on reduction of hospital-level mortality rates,
serious adverse events, and healthcare associated infections. Among the NQF inventory of 550
endorsed measures, approximately 100 measures relate to patient safety. In addition, NQF has
endorsed 34 safe practices in the 2009 update of the Safe Practices for Better Healthcare and 28
Serious Reportable Events. The Safe Practices, SREs, and NQF-endorsed patient safety
measures are important tools for tracking and improving patient safety performance in
American health care. However, significant gaps remain in the measurement of patient safety.
There is also a recognized need to expand available patient safety measures beyond the hospital
setting and harmonize safety measures across sites and settings of care. In order to fill these
gaps and to develop a more robust set of safety measures, NQF will be soliciting patient safety
measures to fill gap areas and to address environment-specific issues with highest potential
leverage for improvement (e.g., healthcare associated infections (e.g., MRSA), culture of safety,
and hospital standardized mortality rates).

SCOPE OF ACTIVITIES

NQF will solicit candidate standards for review, evaluation and potential endorsement as
national voluntary consensus standards for patient safety. The overall goal of the project is to
establish national, multi-stakeholder voluntary consensus on current performance standards
ready for immediate implementation, and on recommendations for priority areas for research
and measure development.

THE NQF PROCESS

The candidate measures will be considered for NQF endorsement as voluntary consensus
standards. Agreement around the recommendations will be developed through NQF’s formal
Consensus Development Process (CDP). This project will involve the active participation of
representatives from across the spectrum of healthcare stakeholders and will be guided by a
Steering Committee with assistance from technical advisors as needed.
Any organization or individual may submit measures for consideration. To be evaluated,
candidate consensus standards must meet the following general criteria:
• Be fully developed for use (e.g., research and testing have been completed);
• Be intended for use in both public reporting and quality improvement;
• Be open source or in the public domain;1 and
• Have an identified measure steward.2
Measure stewards must also have a fully executed Measure Steward Agreement with NQF.
Information on submitting measures to NQF can be found on the NQF website.

FUNDING

This project is supported under a contract provided by the .

CONTACT INFORMATION

For more information, contact Andrew Lyzenga and Elisa Munthali at (202) 783-1300 or via e-mail at alyzenga@qualityforum.org and emunthali@qualityforum.org.

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Patient Safety Measures

CALL FOR INTENT TO SUBMIT NEW STANDARDS Patient Safety Measures

CALL FOR INTENT TO SUBMIT NEW STANDARDS
Patient Safety Measures