(National Quality Forum: Washington) -- Two new studies by the National Quality Forum (NQF) are designed to promote future work in clinical decision support (CDS) and expand the understanding of the benefits of health information technology (HIT) tools on care delivery.

The reports “lay the groundwork for what kind of standards and certification criteria should be considered and put into practice for health IT use measures,” says NQF’s president and CEO Janet Corrigan.

The first report, “Driving Quality: A Model to Measure Electronic Health IT Use,” is based on the work of NQF’s Health Information Technology Utilization Expert Panel, which developed a HIT use-assessment framework. The framework was created to provide a new approach to measuring the use of HIT tools and how that use improves care processes, quality, and safety.

The panel’s work expands on the quality data set, a model of information that describes clinical concepts used in quality measurement and clinical care, according to NQF.

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