Five healthcare organizations have been named winners of the National Quality Forum's Innovation Challenge, a contest to promote innovation in healthcare quality measure development.
The contest, launched Sept. 18, challenged NQF members and others to submit ideas to improve quality metrics aimed at responding to measurement gaps identified by NQF's Measure Incubator work groups, according to a news release.
NQF named five winning concept papers for its Innovation Challenge, marking the first step toward the launch of its Measure Incubator Learning Collaborative.
The 2016 Innovation Challenge winners and their organizational affiliations, as stated in the news release, are:
- Charlotta Lindval, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston) — proposes using natural language processing to develop quality measures in palliative surgery using EHR data
- S. Mani Marashi, Henry Ford Health System (Detroit) — describes a successful two-year pilot to report hospital-acquired venous thromboembolism events in real-time using data from EHRs, instead of claims
- Robert Philips, American Board of Family Medicine — proposes using a new data registry open to all primary care physicians to identify and develop efforts to improve clinical practice and quality measures
- Ellen Shultz and Michelle Langer, American Institutes for Research — suggest using "bookmarking," a method widely used in educational testing, to score and classify patient-reported outcome measures and address this critically important measure gap area
- Tracy Spinks, MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston)—outlines a new, streamlined, standardized approach to implementing PRO measure sets in EHRs
The Innovation Challenge winners will present their papers during NQF webinars later in 2016, according to NQF. Each winner will receive a $2,000 award.