(NQF: Washington) -- The National Quality Forum (NQF) recently released the Quality Data Set (QDS), a common technological framework for defining clinical data necessary to measure performance and accelerate improvement in patients’ quality of care. The QDS framework provides a standardized set of data that should be captured in patients’ electronic health records and is applicable to all care settings that a patient is likely to use in his or her lifetime.

“Providing a common data resource for all stakeholders in the quality-measures supply chain will allow us to align our efforts and improve the comparability of quality reports while dramatically reducing the burden of quality measurement,” says Dr. Paul Tang, chair of the expert panel that drafted the QDS. “This is a dynamic structure that will continue to grow and expand to meet future needs of quality measurement.” Tang is vice president and chief medical information officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and consulting associate professor of medicine (biomedical informatics) at Stanford University.

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