NCQA Launches Virtual Care Accreditation Pilot Program

The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) announced the launch of its Virtual Care Accreditation Pilot program, a key step in NCQA’s development of a quality improvement framework for organizations that provide care via telehealth or other digital platforms.

NCQA selected as pilot organizations a diverse set of 18 organized and engaged entities from the more than 100 that applied. Based in 12 states and Puerto Rico, pilot organizations include health plans, health systems, Federally Qualified Health Centers, patient-centered medical homes and virtual first/virtual only organizations.

The pilot organizations will provide valuable input to the development of NCQA’s Virtual Care Accreditation, a first-of-its-kind program highlighting the quality of care patients receive through virtual or hybrid modalities from many kinds of health care organizations.

Virtual Care Accreditation will highlight and distinguish organizations using virtual modalities to identify gaps in care, provide high-quality care and report and track outcomes.

Early versions of the program will focus on primary care and urgent care. Later versions will provide opportunities for organizations to distinguish themselves for other kinds of care they deliver virtually. Likely options include behavioral healthcare and acute, post-acute or specialty care.

“Care delivery has evolved, and virtual care is a new normal in desperate need of standardization and reliable quality assessment,” said NCQA President Margaret E. O’Kane. “Virtual Care Accreditation will be a roadmap and the foundation of the safe, effective and equitable virtual care people need.”

Four phases compose the roughly 10-month pilot program: learning, testing, preparation and evaluation. An early adopter program and launch of Virtual Care Accreditation will follow the pilot program in mid- to late-2024.

Virtual care pilot organizations include:

• Health Plans
  • Aetna Better Health of Virginia
  • Blue Shield of California
• Health Systems
  • ChristianaCare Health System—The Center for Virtual Health
  • Lehigh Valley Physicians Group
• Patient-Centered Medical Homes
  • Union Health Center
• Federally Qualified Health Center
  • Beaufort Jasper Hampton Comprehensive Health Services, Inc.
  • Institute for Family Health
  • Migrant Health Center Western Region Inc.
  • Zufall Health Center
• Virtual-Only
  • CirrusMD
  • Curai
  • Everly Health
  • Firely Health
  • HubMD PC
  • MDLIVE
  • Privia Virtual Health, LLC