AQA Invitational Meeting

Summary

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The AQA held its sixth meeting to review the activities of workgroups on performance measurement and data sharing and aggregation. Updates were presented on the quality reporting initiatives of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Transparency Initiative of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The meeting was held January 22, 2007.

Select to access the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth meetings.

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Introduction

The AQA (formerly known as the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance) was founded in the fall of 2004 with a mission to improve health care quality and patient safety through a collaborative process in which key stakeholders agree on a strategy for:

• Measuring performance at the physician level.
• Collecting and aggregating data in the least burdensome way.
• Reporting meaningful information to consumers, physicians, and other stakeholders to inform choices and improve outcomes.

The AQA's mission and goals focus on key areas that can help it identify quality gaps, control skyrocketing cost trends, reduce confusion and burdens in the marketplace, and otherwise address the challenges of the current health care system.

The timing of this stakeholder process has coincided with a growing interest in rewarding high-quality providers (through "pay for performance" or p4p) and clinicians' burgeoning interest in adopting health information technology (health IT) to enhance the quality, safety, and efficiency of care delivery.

On January 22, 2007, an AQA meeting was convened to review the activities of two of the AQA's three workgroups (Performance Measurement and Data Sharing and Aggregation). Participants also received an update on CMS's quality reporting initiatives and a briefing on HHS's Transparency Initiative. Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), chaired the meeting.

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