One key to measuring the quality of child health care may be to develop better measures of children’s ability to function.
Staffers at the National Committee for Quality Assurance, Washington, and the Commonwealth Fund, New York, make that suggestion in a new report on strategies for improving child health care quality measurement.
The NCQA, an organization that runs quality reporting programs for health maintenance organizations and preferred provider organizations, is in the process of preparing children’s health care quality measure specifications.
The new Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act directs the secretary of Health and Human Services to identify a core set of quality measures that should be collected by all state-run CHIP plans beginning in 2010.