NQF Offers 5 EHR Recommendations to Aid Care Coordination

The National Quality Forum (NQF) has issued a report offering five recommendations for using EHRs to effectively facilitate, measure, and improve care communication and care coordination across multiple healthcare settings. With funding from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), NQF convened a multistakeholder committee to identify opportunities to measure and improve care communication and care coordination using EHRs. NQF’s new report, “Leveraging Electronic Health Record (EHR)-Sourced Measures to Improve Care Communication and Coordination,” outlines the following five recommendations to make EHRs more useful in measuring and identifying areas for improvement. Initiatives such as USCDI lay the groundwork for this standardization, and the committee identified additional standardized data elements that could be added to EHRs to facilitate the measurement of care communication and care coordination. In addition, the report said, EHRs can improve measure feasibility by replacing chart review and claims-based data with automated extraction; provide data elements (both existing and novel) to develop new measure concepts related to care communication and care coordination; improve the specificity of existing accountability measures by re-specification with an EHR data source; and export data to measure specific processes and outcomes important to care communication and care coordination.