American Health Quality Association (AHQA) was created as an educational, not-for-profit national membership association. Comprising of community-based Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) and other professionals, AHQA works toward improving healthcare and patient safety. AHQA is going to hold this year’s annual meeting in the first week of this month (May 4-6) in Baltimore, Maryland. The event would provide a forum for participants to come together and share best practices for improving the quality of healthcare in America.
McKesson Corporation, a top notch healthcare service provider, has recently announced in one of its press releases that along with a few other QIO players, it is going to participate in this year’s American Health Quality Association Annual Meeting. The other participants include Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and other public and private healthcare organizations at the 2010 American Health Quality Association (AHQA) Annual Meeting.
McKesson’s Laura McIntire, will give a presentation titled “InterQual Beyond Medical Necessity.” The presentation will be focused on the subject relating to recent enhancements to the evidence-based clinical criteria that aim at improving quality of care. Ms McIntire is the InterQual clinical lead.
The AHQA annual conference is going to provide McKesson a vital platform for promoting its InterQual product, which has been serving the medicare community for years. The company seeks to make the industry aware of the novel features of its product as well as get the feedback from the QIOs on what is required to make InterQual even more efficient.
“We have had quality measures built into our InterQual product for years. They are part of the strong evidence-based clinical foundation that has made InterQual become a vital tool for QIOs in managing their Medicare populations. Our participation in the AHQA event gives us a unique opportunity to speak with the quality organizations about what’s new in InterQual and to hear from them about other needs to consider as we design future releases,” said McIntire.
McKesson’s recent InterQual release is specially designed for the high risk conditions. The latest InterQual release is designed to provide an enhanced range of benefits to the QIOs.
First, the QIOs will find it easier to document their efforts via new criteria organized to manage select high risk conditions.
New Quality Indicator Checklists, focused on conditions for which the National Quality Forum has developed inpatient quality measures, will benefit QIOs as a convenient reference.
Finally, QIOs will be able to better manage transitions of care, one of the major initiatives under their current Scope of Work with CMS, with the new InterQual Transition Plan Guidelines that support comprehensive discharge planning for patients at high risk for readmission.
The AHQA platform will provide McKesson the perfect platform for elaborating more on its latest InterQual release.
Madhubanti Rudra is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Erin Harrison
