Dr. William Rich named to NQF committee

San Francisco-William L. Rich III, MD, medical director of health policy for the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), has been appointed to the National Quality Forum (NQF) Efficiency Resource Use Project Steering Committee.

He already is vice chairman of the NQF’s Provider Council.

NQF is a public-private collaborative venture established in 1999 to improve the quality of health care by standardizing the measurement of quality-related information and by promoting quality improvement. The steering committee will provide guidance and lay the groundwork for future endorsement of measures of health-care resource use that will be the building blocks for measures of efficiency. The committee also will consider criteria for evaluating resource-use measures and will consider current evidence and approaches for efficiency and resource-use measures.

“The NQF is charged with a task that is critical to defining the future of quality patient care,” Dr. Rich said. “I am honored to serve with this distinguished panel of health policy leaders.”

Dr. Rich has been the AAO’s medical director of health policy since 2005, has served on the AAO’s Committee of Secretaries as the secretary for federal affairs, and has played an active role in several other AAO activities since the 1970s.

From 2003 to 2009, Dr. Rich was the chairman of the American Medical Association’s Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RUC) Committee, which determines the work values for all physician services. He also chaired the group’s resource subcommittee, which investigated new ethnographic and quantitative approaches to physician work. Dr. Rich also has been a member of several Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Institute of Medicine panels examining fee-for-service medicine, the economics of promoting quality, and health outcomes’ effects on patient choice.

Dr. Rich is a founder and was an executive committee member of the nation’s largest national subspecialty preferred provider organization and of a local independent physicians’ association. He serves on the clinical faculty of Georgetown University and practices as the senior partner with Northern Virginia Ophthalmology Associates. He also is a representative to the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance.