The National Quality Forum has released a new quality data set, a common technological framework for defining clinical data necessary to measure performance and accelerate improvement in patients’ quality of care.

NQF officials say the QDS framework provides a standardized set of data that should be captured in patients’ electronic health records and is applicable to all care settings a patient is likely to use in his or her lifetime.

“Providing a common data resource for all stakeholders in the quality-measures supply chain will allow us to align our efforts and improve the comparability of quality reports while dramatically reducing the burden of quality measurement,” said Paul Tang, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and consulting associate professor of biomedical informatics at Stanford University, as well as chairman of the panel that drafted the QDS. “This is a dynamic structure that will continue to grow and expand to meet future needs of quality measurement.”

 “The Quality Data Set will help ensure that measure developers use common data definitions and conventions when specifying measures for use with electronic health records,” said Janet Corrigan, the NQF’s president and CEO.