FOTO®
FHS ADDED TO NQMCTM’s LIST OF QUALITY MEASURES
FOTO®,
Inc. is pleased to announce that the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services has notified FOTO®. that their Physical Functional Health Status (FHS)
measure has been added to their list of approved quality measures in the
National Quality Measures ClearinghouseTM (NQMCTM), a
public repository for evidence-based quality measures sponsored by the Agency
for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
FOTO®’s Director of Consulting and Research, Dennis L. Hart, PT, PhD, says this
recognition places FOTO®’s treatment effectiveness measure, the FHS, among the
most recognized quality measures in the nation. Alphonso Amato, PT, President of
FOTO, Inc. says “This is a big step toward incentive payments based on
treatment effectiveness and efficiency for rehabilitation providers being
considered by many payers.”
The
NQMCTM list has been designed to provide healthcare providers, health
plans, purchasers, integrated delivery systems, and others an accessible
mechanism for obtaining detailed information on quality measures and to further
their use in making informed healthcare decisions.
The
NQMCTM defines “quality of care” as the “degree to which health
care services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired
health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge”. The
FOTO®, Inc. Physical FHS is a measure of functional abilities commonly used by
people seeking rehabilitation, and serial measures of Physical FHS can be
converted to a measure of improvement of function of these people. The change in
Physical FHS becomes a measure of quality of care over the course of the
rehabilitation received. Functional status is defined as an “individual’s
ability to perform normal activities of life”.
In
addition to being a measure of quality, the Physical FHS is further defined as a
measure in the Institute Of Medicine (IOM) domains of effectiveness and patient
centeredness for individual patients who are receiving care related to an
illness or injury. Effectiveness as defined by the IOM “relates to providing
care processes and achieving outcomes as supported by scientific evidence”,
and patient centeredness “relates to meeting patient’s needs and preferences
and providing education and support”. Both terms are well described and
correlated to the future health care system envisioned by the IOM in their text
“Crossing the Quality Chasm” (2001). As such, the Physical FHS measure and
process of data collection already fulfills many of the attributes the IOM
describes as the “future” of a health care delivery system that is based on
clinical evidence. Measures are part of the “evidence” necessary for patient
evaluation and assessment of whether clinical care produced a desired change in
patient functioning.
Ben
Johnston, FOTO®’s CEO and General Manager states that “FOTO® is proud to be
part of the current and future health care delivery system that is
evidence-based. The Physical FHS measure is generated using Item Response Theory
mathematics, which drives a Computerized Adaptive Testing process (CAT). As such, the
Physical FHS will be constantly becoming more robust and precise as we
co-calibrate and add more questions to the process.
That is the beauty of this cutting-edge methodology.
It enables us to continually improve the precision of measurement while
reducing the patient and clinic administrative burden necessary to collect the
data.”