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AHRQ offers sample report cards on quality

Quality Improvement Monitor, July 20, 2007

Hospitals struggling with growing demands for transparency may want to look at a new tool offered by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) that shows sample report cards for providing quality information to consumers.

"Reporting quality to consumers, anyway you slice it, is a pretty difficult job," says Christine Crofton, PhD, project officer for AHRQ's Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) project.

AHRQ's report card compendium, which includes samples of more than 200 report cards, was developed as a companion piece to the agency's Web site, www.talkingquality.gov, which advises hospitals about how to publicly report data. Crofton says the site is still a good resource to which to go for guidance.

"In fact, I would advise hospitals that really want to report quality to go there and see what the research says about which variables are important," she says. "There's a nice little workbook that's part of that site. It takes the users through all the things they need to think about as they're developing a quality report."

The workbook, Crofton says, helps quality improvement directors come up with a list of questions that they should ask themselves before creating a report card.

For more information, click here.

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