AHRQ's Quality Challenge


On Monday, April 4, 2005, AHRQ hosted "Improving Health Care for All Americans: Celebrating Success, Measuring Progress, Moving Forward." The national summit in Washington, DC, showcased successful national, regional, and local efforts to improve health care quality and reduce racial and ethnic disparities.

Select for a video summary of the summit (14 minutes) or a video presentation of Dr. Clancy's speech (25 minutes) with transcripts.


AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D., issued a call to action to the more than 200 meeting attendees. She urged them to work together to accept a new quality challenge to ensure that "every dollar we invest in health care buys a dollar's worth of value... so that Americans don't just have the best health care in the world, they actually get the best quality health care, consistently, in their own hospitals and physicians' offices."

State-Level Data Compilations

In conjunction with the meeting, AHRQ released State-level health care quality data compilations based on the congressionally mandated 2004 National Healthcare Quality Report to help State health officials more easily identify areas where they are doing well and those where quality improvement may be needed.

These data include:

Additional Resources

AHRQ has a number of resources for quality improvement available online. Select to access a list of Additional Resources.

Current as of April 2005


Internet Citation:

AHRQ's Quality Challenge. Meeting, April 2005. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/challenge.htm


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