Development of automated quality reporting: aligning local efforts with national standards

As providers and systems move towards meaningful use of electronic health records, the once distant vision of data reuse for automated quality reporting may soon become a reality. To facilitate consistent and reliable reporting and benchmarking beyond the local level, standardization of both electronic health record content and quality measures is needed at the concept level. This degree of standardization requires local and national advancement and coordination. The purpose of this paper is to review national efforts that can be leveraged to guide local information modeling and terminology work to support automated quality reporting. Moreover, efforts at Partners HealthCare to map electronic health record content to inpatient quality metrics, terminology standards and to align local efforts with national initiatives are reported. We found that forty-one percent (41%) of the elements needed to populate the inpatient quality measures are represented within the draft documentation content and an additional 29.5% are represented within other Partners HealthCare (PHS) electronic applications. Recommendations are made to support data reuse based on established national standards and identified gaps. Our work indicates that value exists in individual healthcare systems engaging in local standardization work by adopting established methods and standards where they exist. A process is needed, however, to ensure that local work is shared and available to inform national standards.