Remember, Quality Crusaders: “We’ve done ‘hard’ before!”

November 2, 2022 · Andy Reynolds

NCQA founder and President Peggy O’Kane kicked off the first Health Innovation Summit by:

• Admitting creating better care, better choices and better health for everybody in the US is hard.
• Reminding the 1,300 Summit attendees that the quality movement was born to do what’s difficult.

Here’s part of what Peggy said:

What we’re doing to reinvent health care is HARD. But people who care about quality have done “hard” before!

Hard was when people thought it was impossible to measure quality.

Hard was when few people thought HEDIS could ever work, or when a health plan CEO told me, “Quality is not a business issue for us.”

That was hard but we DID IT!

And how did we do it? We did it together.

And that’s how we’ll accomplish our mission now.

The transformations we seek in digital measurement, health equity and payment models are bigger than NCQA. We’re trying to help change an entire ecosystem.

And so we’ll return to the early roots of the quality movement.

We’ll work with new partners. We’ll build new skills.

We won’t cling to the past. But we’ll learn from it.

We’ll find out things we’re doing are flawed—that’s called the human condition.

We’ll take the good things that we’ve been doing and carry those forward. And then we’ll do the new things that we have to do.

For more news & views from the Summit, download mini-editions of Inside Health Care and check social media: #NCQASUMMIT2022.