What is the Quality Alliance Steering Committee?
QASC, formed in 2006, is a collaborative effort among existing quality alliances, government, physicians, nurses, hospitals, health insurers, consumers, accrediting agencies and foundations to dramatically improve the quality of health care across the U.S. Together, all of these stakeholders are working to ensure that quality measures are constructed and reported in a clear and consistent way that informs both consumer and employer decision-making, as well as the efforts of practitioners to improve.
Read the full original press release announcing the formation of QASC
What is the vision of QASC?
The vision of QASC is to advance high-quality, cost-effective, patient-centered health care through the coordination of the various groups that are working to promote public reporting of health care provider information for:
- Improvement directly by providers;
- Consumer decision-making; and
- Effective policies, payment policies and consumer incentives that reward or foster better provider performance.
Why was QASC formed?
Many different private- and public-sector groups have designed models for assessing performance and reporting data. However, the proliferation of multiple, uncoordinated and sometimes conflicting initiatives has significant unintended consequences for different stakeholders – unnecessarily burdening physicians, nurses, clinics and hospitals; creating confusion among consumers; and detracting from efforts by employers to design programs that meet the needs of their employees. QASC will help coordinate and build the initial components of an infrastructure to collect health care quality and cost data nationwide.
Who leads QASC?
The Quality Alliance Steering Committee is co-chaired by Carolyn Clancy, MD, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, former CMS administrator, who is now senior fellow and director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
List of QASC Principals (pdf)
How is QASC related to other quality initiatives currently underway?
In the past several years of trying to improve the quality of health care, there have been overlapping and sometimes competing efforts to measure and report on health care quality. The QASC is providing a catalyst for measuring and publicly reporting health care information about the overall patient experience. As QASC works to help stakeholders fill these gaps in achieving a high-quality health care system, it will also continue to integrate its efforts with the ongoing critical activities of the other organizations involved in quality improvement, particularly NQF.
What has already been accomplished through QASC over the last year?
For the past year, pilots at six sites supported by funding from CMS and AHRQ, under the auspices of the AQA alliance, have begun to test approaches to combining data from the public and private sectors and ways to measure and report on physician practice in a meaningful and transparent way for consumers and purchasers of health care.
What are the next steps for QASC?
Next, with substantial funding from RWJF, QASC will begin to test approaches to combining summary provider information from Medicare and private health plan data at the national level, offering a more complete picture of providers. These provider-level measures will be available to regional collaborations to use in improving the quality of health care. The RWJF-funded work also recognizes the impact of racial and ethnic health care disparities on quality improvement efforts and will ensure that these new efforts to create measures from large, national sets of data report these measures in ways that identify important racial and ethnic disparities.