Marcia Ward, PhD, has been selected to serve as co-chair and member of the National Quality Forum’s (NQF’s) Telehealth Multistakeholder Committee for the Telehealth Framework to Support Measure Development project. 

Ward is a professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the University of Iowa College of Public Health and director of the Rural Telehealth Research Center.

NQF is a non-profit, non-partisan, membership-based organization that brings together public and private sector stakeholders to reach consensus on health care performance measurement. Its goal is to make health care in the U.S. better, safer, and more affordable.

The objective of this NQF project is to assess the best way to measure the quality of health care services that incorporate telehealth as the primary delivery method and to guide the future development of telehealth-related measures.

This multistakeholder group includes 26 individuals who are charged with providing guidance and recommendations to determine appropriate telehealth measurements by reviewing clinical and non-clinical aspects of telehealth, such as quality metrics, outcomes, and differentiation of modes of care. They will then identify gaps and develop a measurement framework as well as a set of guiding principles for future telehealth measurement. The committee is tasked to complete its work in one year.