The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) was founded in 1990. As a principal figure in raising the bar for improving health care, the private not-for-profit organization is dedicated to keeping the issue of health care quality at the frontline of national concern. NCQA has been highly instrumental in building an invaluable consensus among policy makers, large corporations, physicians and health plan consumers with regard to transforming the health care system. They agree on what needs to be improved, how to quantify it, and how improvement should be promoted.

Working with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), NCQA commenced the country’s first Medicare administered care outcomes program in the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) in 1998 to assess the quality of Medicare. The initiative consisted of the latest progress in summarizing mental and physical health outcomes through suitable threat modification techniques and the Medicare Health Outcomes Survey results stated that for anyone under the age of 65 and who may be disabled in the Medicare program, qualified.

When Medicare recipients were entering HMOs and other managed care associations by the droves, NCQA teamed up with CMS to integrate members in the Medicare program into NCQA’s HEDIS performance capacity set. It was apparent that performance reporting requirements for Medicare managed care was greatly needed, thus heightened standards were set for purchasers’ reporting requirements in the commercial insurance marketplace. HEDIS contained measures which appraised involvement like mammograms done on mature women and eye exams for diabetes patients. Experts in performance measurement teamed up to increase measures that would levy the overall functioning mental wellness of Medicare recipients over an extended period of time. In order to achieve suitable plan to plan comparisons, this particular measure would have to include more items to allow for case mix modification.

Today, NCQA requires accredited health plans to endure a meticulous set of over 60 standards and report on their performance in over 40 areas to earn NCQA’s approval seal. Even tougher standards are being developed to increase the quality of service, reduce costs, and improve care. Medicare Health Outcomes Survey has remained a vital section of the NCDQ’s evaluation of health plan value because it is the sole patient-reported outcomes determinant in Medicare managed care, with information having been collected commencing in 1998. The National Committee for Quality Assurance continues to contribute to the health care system through measures in the form of statistics that track the quality of care offered by the nation’s health plans. These numbers have improved every year for the past five years. Health care procedures have been fine-tuned, physicians have learned new methods of practice, and patients have become more involved with their own health care.