National Quality Forum is joining the Joint Commission in a merger deal that the groups say will allow both to refine quality and outcome measures they develop for the industry.
Under the arrangement announced Wednesday, the forum will become “an affiliate member” under the Joint Commission enterprise “while maintaining its independence in convening and developing consensus-based measures, implementation guidance and practices that benefit all stakeholders,” per the announcement. Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 1999, National Quality Forum is a nonprofit that convenes more than 300 member organizations representing clinicians, patients, health systems, payers and purchasers. The stakeholders help the forum develop quality measures that have been tapped by federal policymakers such as the Department of Health and Human Services and others.
Joining the nation’s oldest independent healthcare accreditation and certification body will be mutually beneficial to the two groups’ goals, the leaders of each said.
The new source of stakeholder input will help the Joint Commission’s processes become more evidence-based, data-driven and outcomes-oriented, they said.
Meanwhile, the Joint Commission’s broad reach of more than 22,000 accredited and certified U.S. healthcare organizations and programs provides the forum “an essential platform for deploying the next generation of measures meaningful to patients and important to clinicians and—finally—achieving the population health improvements and improved affordability we all want to see,” National Quality Forum President and CEO Dana Gelb Safran said in a release.
Of note, the new partners stressed that their upcoming work won’t produce a deluge of new requirements for healthcare organizations.
“This doesn’t mean more measures. It means fewer measures, more precise measures, better measures,” Joint Commission President and CEO Jonathan Perlin, M.D., said in a video on the combination. “It means that there’s a process to convene different stakeholders to agree on what are the most important outcomes for patients, for clinicians, for health systems. It means that we can really reduce the burden on providers who are wrestling with trying to do the right thing but really saddled with the burden of multiple measures with the same attempt.
“And it means that as the National Quality Forum independently convenes these important stakeholders … there’s a voice that helps to identify what each of those constituency is best in terms of their outcomes, then it funnels them into the tightest possible measure set that can feed forward into a number of processes,” he said.
The combination already looks to have the blessing of the hospital industry. Included in the organizations’ announcement were comments from Federation of American Hospitals President and CEO Charles Kahn characterizing the merger as “an important and timely move” for providers.
“Adding NQF’s ability to drive evidence-based consensus across diverse stakeholders to The Joint Commission’s established expertise and proven track record in health care performance assessment will help build a measurement platform for the future,” Kahn said in the announcement release. “Bringing these two organizations together should foster a collaborative process where everyone works together to create streamlined and consistent clinical performance measurement supporting better patient care outcomes, as well as more helpful clinician and provider transparency.”
The Joint Commission has already been busy trimming burdens for the organizations it oversees.
Just last month, it unveiled the second tranche of an ongoing accreditation standards reduction, which as of Aug. 27 will eliminate or consolidate over 200 standards “that do not add value to accreditation surveys.” This came after a similar revision of 182 standards back in December.
In June, the Joint Commission introduced a voluntary certification for hospitals and critical access hospitals pursuing health equity. The so-called Health Care Equity Certification Program “is well-suited for organizations that are already on their journey to healthcare equity and would like to formalize structures, processes and goals for identifying and addressing health disparities,” the Joint Commission said.