Two new studies released Friday by the National Quality Forum (NQF) are designed to promote future work in clinical decision support (CDS) and expand the understanding of the impact of health IT tools on care delivery.

The reports lay "the groundwork for what kind of standards and certification criteria should be considered and put into practice for health IT use measures," said NQF's President and CEO Janet Corrigan, PhD, MBA.

The first report, Driving Quality: A Model to Measure Electronic Health IT Use, is based on the work of NQF's Health Information Technology Utilization Expert Panel, which developed a "Health IT Use Assessment Framework." The framework was created to provide a new approach to measuring the use of health IT tools--and how that use improves care processes, quality, and safety.

The expert panel's work expands on the Quality Data Set--"a model of information" that describes clinical concepts used in quality measurement and clinical care, according to NQF.

For the second report, Driving Quality and Performance Measurement: A Foundation for Clinical Decision Support, NQF convened another expert panel to develop a CDS taxonomy. The report is designed to provide a foundation for the description of an electronic infrastructure to bridge quality measurement and health IT.

For more details:
- see the National Quality Forum announcement
- read the article in Healthcare IT News

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