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The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) last month released the National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care (also known as the National Quality Strategy).

The strategy is authorized under the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) and represents the first federal effort to create national aims and priorities to guide local, state, and national efforts to improve the quality of health care in the United States, according to the HHS.

“The strategy poses both opportunities and challenges for optometry,” said AOA President Joe Ellis, O.D. “This initiative is designed to improve health care outcomes through better-coordinated, more comprehensive care. It is intended to provide more affordable health care that is better targeted to the specific needs of patients and communities. As widely recognized providers of quality, costeffective, accessible, primary health care, optometrists will clearly have an  important role to play in this strategy. It will effectively encourage the involvement of optometrists in multidisciplinary health care teams. However, it will also increasingly require all health care practitioners to demonstrate the efficacy of the care they provide.”

The national program to improve the quality of health care is one of several major efforts authorized under last year’s ACA health care reform law. Others include an overhaul of the health insurance market, new initiatives to encourage personal “wellness” among Americans, and administrative simplification. The strategy places top priority on addressing chronic conditions that are leading causes of mortality, as well as the elimination of medical errors. It also places  emphasis on:

• Development of a “better coordinated, less fragmented” health care system, 
• Better targeting of care to specific patients need,
• Greater involvement of patients in their care, 
• Objective measurement of the efficacy of care, and 
• Efforts to ensure continuing competency among health care practitioners trough initiatives such as certification programs.

“Optometrists will be better positioned than most health care practitioners to serve patients and grow as professionals amid a new emphasis on health care quality,” Dr. Ellis said. “Anticipating just these types of reforms, organized  optometry has for years worked to establish optometrists as widely recognized providers of eye health care (including care for ocular manifestations of chronic, systemic conditions) and help optometrists participants in coordinated health care teams. Through programs such as Healthy Eyes Healthy People®, optometrists have demonstrated their ability to provide care that is targeted to the specific needs of patients and communities.

Perhaps most important, the AOA Clinical Practice Guidelines and American Board of Optometry’s new Board Certification Examination will help to ensure that optometrists will set the standards by which they are measured under quality improvement and continuing competency programs, instead of having those standards dictated by forces outside the profession.”

For additional information on the ACA National Quality Strategy, see the HHS Report to Congress: National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care document on the agency’s Health Care Web site (www.HealthCare.gov/center/reports).

Detailed explanations of  the ACA insurance reforms (Report to Congress on a Study of the Large Group Market) and other reform initiatives can also be accessed on the Web site. A summary of the ACA insurance market reforms will appear in the Practice Strategies section of the June edition of Optometry: Journal of the American Optometric Association.

Additional information on the National Quality Improvement Strategy can also be found on the AHRQ Web site (www.ahrq.gov/workingforquality).