About the National Quality Strategy

Overview and Legislative Authority
Developing the National Quality Strategy
Reports

Overview and Legislative Authority

The Affordable Care Act seeks to increase access to high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans. To that end, the law, in Section 3011, requires the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish a National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care (the National Quality Strategy) that sets priorities to guide this effort and includes a strategic plan for how to achieve it. This report describes the initial Strategy and plan for implementation.

Developing the National Quality Strategy

The Secretary developed this initial National Quality Strategy and plan through a participatory, transparent, and collaborative process that reached out to a range of stakeholders for comment. This process culminated in a request for public comment on a proposed approach to the effort and a draft set of principles and priorities. More than 300 groups, organizations, and individuals provided comments (PDF file, 1.1 MB; PDF Help. HTML Version), representing all sectors of the health care industry and the general public. Based on this input, a set of three overarching aims were developed to establish a framework within which specific priorities could be identified and implemented.

Aims

The National Quality Strategy will pursue three broad aims. These aims will be used to guide and assess local, State, and national efforts to improve health and the quality of health care.

Better Care: Improve the overall quality, by making health care more patient-centered, reliable, accessible, and safe.
Healthy People/Healthy Communities: Improve the health of the U.S. population by supporting proven interventions to address behavioral, social and, environmental determinants of health in addition to delivering higher-quality care.
Affordable Care: Reduce the cost of quality health care for individuals, families, employers, and government.

Setting Priorities

To advance these aims, the National Quality Strategy will focus initially on six priorities:

Ensuring that each person and family is engaged as partners in their care.
Promoting effective communication and coordination of care.
Promoting the most effective prevention and treatment practices for the leading causes of mortality, starting with cardiovascular disease.
Working with communities to promote wide use of best practices to enable healthy living.
Making quality care more affordable for individuals, families, employers, and governments by developing and spreading new health care delivery models.
Making care safer by reducing harm caused in the delivery of care.

Principles for the National Quality Strategy

And finally, a set of ten basic principles (PDF File, 158 KB, PDF Help) were articulated, which will govern how health care services should be provided and how institutions and health professionals should conduct their activities.

Reports

National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care. (PDF File, 193 KB; PDF Help)
Submitted to Congress on March 21, 2011.

Multi-Stakeholder Group Input on Quality Measures.
Description of the Federal "pre-rulemaking process" for the selection of quality and efficiency measures for specific qualifying programs within HHS. Developed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Annual Update

The National Quality Strategy will be updated annually.