National Quality Forum Looks to Update Telehealth Quality Benchmarks

The coronavirus pandemic, now creeping into its second year, has given federal regulators mountains of data on telehealth. Now it’s up to the National Quality Forum to develop a framework for measuring how well telehealth has done and what it can do better.

“Right now there are zero endorsed measures that are telehealth-focused,” says Sheri Winsper, senior vice president of quality measurement for the Washington, DC-based organization. So the NQF has its work cut out as it looks to measure how connected health tools and platforms have affected dynamics like clinical outcomes, access to care, patient engagement and cost of care.

Winsper, a recent participant in Xtelligent Healthcare Media’s Healthcare Strategies podcast series, says the NQF is now working on an update of its 2017 telehealth framework. The organization is partnering with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as well, and has created a committee to look at how telehealth has affected outcomes and health system readiness in rural areas, which have been hard-hit by COVID-19.

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“We know at NQF that telehealth has the potential to transform the healthcare delivery system by overcoming geographical distance between providers and patients (and improving) access to care,” she said. In addition, it has the potential to decrease cost, improve population health, improve efficiency and improve the well-being of care providers.

But has that potential been realized in the past year?

Prior to the pandemic, Winsper said, telehealth existed in pockets, primarily in large health systems in urban areas. When COVID-19 hit, however, everyone sought to push as much care as possible from in-person to virtual channels, in essence pushing the telehealth development curve ahead by 10 years.

Winsper said the NQF’s mission now is to take the data gathered by the surge in telehealth use and figure out whether it’s solving barriers to care or improving outcomes.

“How can we learn from that data now that so many people are using telehealth?” she asked.

For instance, she said, how should telehealth be compared to in-person care, especially in areas where access to in-person care is limited? Should different modalities be measured differently or held up to the same standards of care? And what information should patients have when they select which platform to access care?

In its work with CMS, Winsper said NQF has two additional goals: examine how an emergency like COVID-19 affects telehealth use, and how it affects rural healthcare delivery.

The report “will create a framework that links quality of care delivered by telehealth and its outcomes during a disaster,” she said. “We’re going to be addressing whether telehealth can really be measured in a way that care provided in person is just as comparable as care provided in a video conference.”