Ensuring Quality Health Care

Roundtable

The State as Leaders—Developing Integrated Strategies to Ensure High Quality Care

In this session participants discussed ways in which States and communities can apply some of the lessons learned in this workshop to create and refine their own quality initiatives.

Among the points raised in this roundtable discussion were the following:

• To improve the effectiveness of communication on quality issues across different stakeholders, such as public health agencies, purchasers, and health plans, it is important to work toward using common language and terminology that all parties understand, so that differences in organizational cultures do not impede collaboration.
• Coordination across State agencies can help to strengthen, streamline, and rationalize the State's quality-related activities. Several States in attendance shared information on the efforts they have underway to coordinate and integrate such efforts.
• States, in their roles as health care purchasers, are likely to find that they have much in common with other private sector purchasers in the State, and that both parties could potentially benefit through their involvement in collaborative efforts.

Current as of June 1997

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Internet Citation:

Ensuring Quality Health Care: The Challenges of Measuring Performance and Consumer Satisfaction. Workshop Summary, June 4-6, 1997, User Liaison Program. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/news/ulp/ulpqual.htm