Quality Insights, a non-profit organization focused on using data and community solutions to improve healthcare, beat out 3 bidders to be awarded a nearly 5 year contract in support of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Quality Insights is a dedicated group of more than 200 physicians, nurses, health services researchers, statisticians, data analysts and educators dedicated to “bringing people and information together to improve health.” We are actively working to help achieve the National Quality Strategy and its three goals of better care, smarter spending and healthier people. We strive to be a change agent, trusted partner and integrator of local organizations collaborating to improve care.
Background
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Performance Measurement (API-PM) within the Office of Analytics and Performance Improvement has a requirement for contract support of the External Peer Review Program (EPRP) VII.
The mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Performance Measurement (API-PM) within the Office of Analytics and Performance Improvement is to measure and monitor care, as well, as identify opportunities for improvement, ensuring the
highest quality of care for Veterans. In meeting these goals, API-PM strives to provide high quality, effective and efficient data and information services to those responsible for providing care to the Veterans at the point-of-care, as well as, throughout all the points of the Veterans’ health care in an effective, timely and compassionate manner.
API-PM serves as a vehicle for effecting change in a balanced fashion. Through measurement development, review, analysis and monitoring the quality of care, API-PM:
• Supports transparency for VHA’s initiative to publicly report data.
• Measures Improvements in Health Outcomes.
• Identifies opportunities for improvement, ensuring the highest quality of care for Veterans.
• Provides customer-centric data, tools and reports that strengthen facility and system-level performance, quality of care, efficiency, resilience and enhance Veteran experience.
The purpose of the External Peer Review Program (EPRP) Contract is to operate a system of external review of medical records and transition to electronic measurement to assess the quality of both inpatient and outpatient care across the continuum delivered by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). The EPRP Program ensures that care provided to Veterans is evidence-based and delivered quickly and efficiently while maintaining a level of quality that meets or exceeds the standard of care. The work done through the EPRP contract is aligned with external comparators such as National Quality Forum (NQF),
National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and The Joint Commission (TJC). EPRP is essential to the development, testing and validation of electronic measures and the transition to Oracle Health and is considered the gold standard of measurement within the VHA.
The information generated by this work is also used in public reporting of VHA Medical Center performance. The Contract’s work directly impacts the quality of patient care as it
is designed to measure and monitor, as well as identify opportunities for improvement, ensuring the highest quality of care for Veterans. The Program has and must continue to
successfully transition to support VHA programmatic changes and has increased transparency while remaining true to the basic concept and philosophy. Importantly, the Program provides an independent and impartial evaluation of the quality of care delivered to our Veterans, and it will include key initiatives in Federal measurement space, including Promoting Interoperability and standards adoption (HL7/FHIR).
Key services include working with VHA subject matter experts (SME) to independently and/or collaboratively build opportunities for the development, testing and validation of new measures and/or specifications. New measure development will support and drive ongoing quality improvement activities in VHA and enable performance comparison with external comparators.
VA-25-0000045036C77624R011736C77625C0030