NCQA Launches Digital Quality Hub
July 10, 2024 · Becky Kolinski
NCQA has launched a new Digital Quality Hub website with information and resources to support health care organizations in their transition to digital quality measurement. If you are new to digital quality, or your organization is in the early stages of planning and adoption, the Digital Quality Hub can help you get started.
The site provides answers to key questions on the digital quality journey, including:
- Why digital quality?
- What do you need to know?
- How do you implement digital quality?
There is also a Resources page with best practices, user guides, training sessions and more.
We asked Brad Ryan, NCQA’s Chief Growth Officer, to provide insight on the transition to digital quality measurement, and how NCQA is helping organizations move forward.
Why should health care organizations care about digital quality?
Digital quality measurement is a fundamental shift of how we collect and share data about quality in the health care industry. Digitalization offers three major benefits:
- Saves time and money. Streamlining data collection (from health plans, electronic health records and other sources) by leveraging standards will reduce the overall burden, and distributing quality measures and content digitally will democratize access to insights about care to any organization, rapidly and cost-effectively.
- Supports more use cases. With access to more clinical data, we can build better measures to support population health initiatives. Currently many of our measures are limited to a specific type of organization—such as a health plan or provider—and don’t focus on a population, such as people with diabetes or heart disease. Creating new measures with an expanded data set broadens the scope of what we can measure, who can use the data and how they can use it.
- Enables value-based care. The move to value-based care requires trusted data and meaningful measures of quality. Many payers and providers struggle with value-based contracting because of data concerns (e.g., the patient’s medical record shows they received a service, but the payer doesn’t have the data). Moving to digital quality measurement, with a common dataset that payers and providers can trust, will make value-based contracting and payment much easier.
What is NCQA’s role in digital quality measurement?
NCQA is constantly evolving to meet changes in the industry. Our Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) measures are used to evaluate the quality of care for more than 216 million people in the United States. We are committed to making HEDIS digital so we can continue to support our customers and fulfill mandates from the federal government regarding digital quality measurement.
Why did NCQA create the Digital Quality Hub?
Even with a good understanding of why digital quality measurement is necessary, health care organizations struggle with where to begin. NCQA created the Digital Quality Hub to accelerate the transition to digital quality measurement by providing information and resources for health care payers, providers and vendors.
What else is NCQA doing to support the transition to digital quality?
The Digital Quality Hub is only one component of NCQA’s overall strategy. Many organizations are involved in digital quality and are focused on different parts of the solution. NCQA is building a framework for digital quality that encompasses a range of needs and interests.
You can download a summary of NCQA’s digital quality offerings here. We have a long road ahead of us, but we are making great progress—and NCQA is committed to reaching the finish line!
To learn more about the transition to digital quality, visit the Digital Quality Hub website.
Additional Resources
View these resources for more information about NCQA’s framework for digital quality.
- Digital Quality Implementers Community
- Bulk FHIR Coalition
- Data Aggregator Validation
- Digital Content Services
HEDIS® is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).
