The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) announced today that three leading health care IT companies are participating in its electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) pilot testing program, eMeasure. All three companies work with electronic health record (EHR) data. The program will test the ability to access and report data generated by EHRs for quality measurement purposes.
The pilot program, which includes 10 measures from the Adult and Child core set in the Meaningful Use program, serves as a starting point for what will become NCQA’s full eMeasure Certification program. The eMeasure tests will validate measure-specific software code that extracts data from EHRs. The program is modeled on NCQA’s Measure CertificationSM program that similarly validates software code used to extract data, but from health insurance claims. In both cases, NCQA validates the code by generating test data sets for each measure.
NCQA’s goal is to validate any electronic quality measures reporting ability to calculate the Meaningful Use measures and ensure the reliability of providers’ eCQM data transferred to health plans for Healthcare Effectiveness Data Information Set (HEDIS®) reporting. These tests will ensure that providers’ electronic health records data is accurately extracted and sent to be integrated into the data sets most often used to evaluate health care quality, HEDIS and Medicare Stars. IT companies, health plans, registries and providers that use certified software code are rewarded with reduced HEDIS audit requirements.
The three companies participating in the pilot program are:
- Wellcentive, Inc., Alpharetta, GA
- SpectraMedix SpectraMD USA, Inc., East Windsor, NJ
- eClinicalWorks, LLC, Westborough, MA
For more information on the eMeasure Certification program, contact the NCQA Measure Validation Director, Anne Smith at 202-955-5154.
About NCQA
NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations. It also recognizes clinicians and practices in key areas of performance. NCQA is committed to providing health care quality information for consumers, purchasers, health care providers and researchers.
HEDIS® is a registered trademark of NCQA.
NCQA Measure CertificationSM is a service mark of NCQA. All rights reserved.
Contacts
National Committee for Quality Assurance
Andy Reynolds, 202-955-3518
reynolds@ncqa.org
or
Matt Brock, 202-955-1739
brock@ncqa.org
