
Quality Health Care: The degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge.
—The Institute of Medicine
Vision
The ACCP Quality Improvement Committee (QIC) advocates for improved health-care outcomes for our patients by identifying, endorsing, and implementing quality improvement strategies, measures, and products that have a quantifiable impact on patient care.
Mission
The mission of the QIC will be to carry out the vision in the following ways:
- Participate in the development, endorsement, and implementation of the highest quality performance measures by collaborating with the most appropriate measures development and endorsement organizations, eg, the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI), National Quality Forum (NQF), National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance (AQA).
- Work in concert with the ACCP Health and Science Policy (HSP) Committee to identify specific recommendations, from ACCP evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, for proposal to measures development organizations for potential development into performance measures.
- Advocate for the modification or removal of performance measures that do not meet the needs of ACCP members’ patients or do not completely meet the QIC criteria for a “good” performance measure.
- Develop registries, educational materials, and other products to provide guidance to the ACCP membership on quality improvement measures, processes, benchmarking, implementation, reporting, analysis, and publication matters related to performance measurement and related programs, eg, pay for performance.
Background: The American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) endorses a multidisciplinary approach to the improvement of patient care through education. In addition to clinical education and evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, it is in the purview of the College to educate the membership on matters that affect their practices and recertification through government and other regulations and management changes. As a result of the climate resulting from the Institute of Medicine's To Err Is Human1 and Quality Chasm2 report and subsequent forays into quality improvement through performance metrics and pilot programs linking reimbursement to performance measures, the Board of Regents of the ACCP in October 2005 approved the formation of the Quality Improvement Committee (QIC). Effective at CHEST 2006 in Salt Lake City, Utah, the QIC was enlarged to a full standing committee of the ACCP with a membership of 13. Eventually, as the committee matures, there will also be a 14th position of ex officio Past Chair.
Priorities: The QIC priorities for its focus in the first year and beyond include the following:
- Establish the foundation of the QIC committee (including growth to a fully constituted working committee of 13 members) – Completed October 2006
- Actively participate and respond to the National Quality Forum (NQF) measures and policies as they relate to pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine (participate at strategic meetings and represent ACCP membership) – Ongoing
- Actively participate in the American Medical Association (AMA) Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement – Ongoing
- Implement a QIC public section on ACCP's Web site, working toward educating ACCP members about quality improvement, in general, and NQF-endorsed performance measures, in particular – Ongoing
- Consider the development of performance improvement continuing medical education (CME) under the January 2007 guidelines outlined by the AMA – Ongoing
- Monitor other organizations involved in quality improvement and performance measures (Ambulatory care Quality Alliance, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, etc) and brainstorm future strategic initiatives – Ongoing
- Kohn LT, Corrigan JM, Donaldson MS. To err is human: building a safer health system. Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine, 2000
- Committee on Quality of Health Care in America IOM. Crossing the quality chasm: a new health system for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001