Blumenthal puts quality reporting at apex of meaningful use

National health information technology coordinator David Blumenthal emphasized that the ability of clinicians to amass, analyze and report healthcare quality measures lays at the heart of his office's strategy for using IT to transform the US healthcare system. "The key to meaningful use is to know how to measure for performance and to be able to give feedback to providers," he said Oct. 15 at a conference sponsored by the National Quality Forum, which promotes and develops quality measures. The aim is to take existing quality measures and convert them into metrics that can be incorporated into electronic health records in a standard form so they can be compared across practices and geography, he said. "We expect that to be an ever more important requirement to improve healthcare," Blumenthal said, adding that the National Quality Forum is retooling some existing measures for use in electronic health records.