The Opportunity

Leveraging a unique multistakeholder approach, Aligned Innovation is designed to deliver measures that are broadly socialized, tested, validated and ready for implementation in a period of 24 months or less. Moreover, for every new measure adopted, stakeholders seek to retire 2+ measures from their performance accountability measure sets. Aligned Innovation aims to solve a set of longstanding challenges that imperil the success of value-based payment, population health improvement, and health equity advancement, namely:

• Our nation’s portfolio of endorsed measures remains largely focused on process, not outcomes.
• Measures do not reflect the outcomes that matter most to patients.
• The traditional measure development process takes too long and costs too much.
• Measures often emerge without having been broadly socialized—only to discover operational barriers and clinical objections that stymie implementation and use.

About the Project

Aligned Innovation launched in October 2022 with a bold, purpose-driven coalition of public and private sector payers, purchasers, and providers. This coalition provides input on the most urgent measurement gaps and brings their diverse provider partners to the table to participate in measure development and testing. With a national cross-section of providers representing every care setting—ranging from FQHCs to Academic Medical Centers, urban and rural, large, and small—Aligned Innovation purposefully identifies and addresses clinical objections and operational barriers that could otherwise impede measure acceptance and use.

Additionally, through deep and ongoing engagement with stakeholders across the ecosystem who represent vital constituents, end-users, and enablers of the measures—including medical and surgical specialty societies, accreditors, federal agencies, purchaser coalitions, consumer and patient advocates, solution vendors and states—the Aligned Innovation process works to ensure that measures come out ready for broad adoption and use.

Based on priority measure gaps identified in fall 2022, NQF convened patients and clinicians with experiences relevant to those priorities to elicit the outcomes that matter most. As a result, the following outcome measure concepts are moving forward for development:

• Behavioral health (BH) outcomes for children, adolescents, and adults
• Maternal health outcomes associated with reducing severe maternal morbidity (SMM).
• Health equity assessment methods applicable across both BH and maternal outcome measures

We are now moving forward to identify to engage qualified measure developers for this cycle of Aligned Innovation measure development. We also welcome additional coalition members or other interested stakeholders.

Contact Information

If your organization is interested in joining this work, or if you’d like more information, please contact us at Alignedinnovation@qualityforum.org.