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AQA Invitational Meeting
Summary
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.
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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