The National Quality Forum has released new performance measures for physicians who treat patients with mental disorders. The guidelines are designed to help mental health professionals prevent and treat mental illnesses. Primarily, the NQF hopes to screen more patients to catch previously unidentified problems, ensuring that those who have illnesses receive care. "The 49 consensus standards comprise the next step in [the forum's] ongoing, multi-year effort to endorse a standardized set of measures for gaging and publicly reporting the quality of ambulatory care, bringing to 86 the total number of voluntary consensus standards for ambulatory care to date," the forum said in a statement.

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