Welcome and Orientation

Welcome to TalkingQuality, a site that supports efforts to educate and inform consumers about health care quality.

About This Site

The TalkingQuality site was designed for people and organizations trying to educate consumers about health care quality. In particular, it is intended to help those who are providing consumers with information on the performance of health plans and providers.

Read this section to discover:

• What You Can Find in This Site.
• Why You Might Want This Information.
• Where You Might Want to Start.
• Who Produced This Site.

What You Can Find in This Site

This site offers the latest research findings, real-world examples, and innovative ideas on ways to communicate complex information on health care quality to consumers. The material is based on interviews and publications provided by a variety of sources, including:

• Experienced sponsors of quality information projects.
• Researchers in the field of quality reporting.
• Researchers in related fields, such as linguistics, health communications, health promotion, disease prevention, and marketing.

What Is Included

The purpose of the site is to provide sponsors of quality reporting projects with a comprehensive reference manual and Workbook that combines insights into state-of-the-art activities with the current evidence on what works best with consumers. To maintain a focus on reporting issues rather than measurement issues, this site strongly emphasizes projects with the following two characteristics:

• They are oriented toward the information needs and concerns of consumers.
• They rely on well-tested, standardized measures that are widely accepted and used by a broad base of public and private entities.

For that reason, while recognizing that consumers need to know about quality at every level of the health care system, the site primarily refers to the development of quality reports on health plans and large clinics or other provider groups, such as care systems. To help illustrate useful concepts, several examples of reports on the quality of hospitals and group practices are also included.

What Is Not Included

While this site is the result of a thorough effort to organize and package a large and diverse set of experiences and research findings, it does not cover every conceivable issue related to the reporting of health care quality. In particular, three topics are not addressed here:

• The development of quality measures.

While you will find some basic information about the kinds of measures that are typically included in quality reports for consumers, this Web site does not address the process of developing and testing measures or the need to create new measures that speak directly to consumers’ concerns about health care quality.

• The reporting of quality at the level of individual practitioners.

Whatever else they may find useful, consumers would really like to have information on the quality of individual practitioners. However, the measurement of quality at this level faces too many barriers at this time, including cost and patient privacy issues. While a variety of organizations are currently working to overcome these barriers, efforts to measure and report on physician quality are in their infancy.

• Information on treatment choices.

For many patients, the choice among several treatment options is one of the most important decisions they will ever have to make. Access to information that clearly and succinctly compares the benefits and risks of those options would have great value to them. While the ability to make sound, well-informed decisions about treatment is a critical component of quality care, this specific topic is not covered in this site. For a consumer document on this topic, go to Now You Have a Diagnosis: What’s Next?

Why You Might Want This Information

You may be interested in the material on this site if you participate in or sponsor any project to educate consumers about health care quality or inform them about the performance of specific health care organizations. Whether your organization is public or private, for-profit or nonprofit, large or small, local or National, you share a common challenge with other project sponsors:

How can you convey comparative information about health care quality so that consumers can both understand and use the data to make better-informed decisions?

This site will help you answer this question.

Where You Might Want to Start

Where you get started in this site will depend on how involved you are (or intend to be) in quality information projects and how much experience you already have with consumer health information.

How Do You Define Your Role?

This site is intended to serve the needs of different kinds of organizations—from those that handle every component of a quality information project to those that simply direct their constituencies to reliable sources of information.

• A "do-it-yourselfer" is responsible for gathering new information, packaging it, and distributing it to consumers. If this describes your role, you can expect to find useful material throughout this site.
• A "repackager" takes existing data and adapts it to the needs of a specific audience. For instance, a repackager might use data on the performance of Medicare HMOs to create a report on Medicare plans for local seniors. If this sounds like what you do, your concerns probably echo those of the "do-it-yourselfer." With the likely exception of the material on collecting and analyzing data, most of this site should be useful to you.
• Finally, a "pointer" refers its constituency to other credible sources of useful information rather than providing the data itself. If this is your role, you may be interested in reading What to Say and Into the Hands of Consumers. These sections suggest educational content you could be sharing with consumers and ways in which you can help them process the information they get.

Have You Done This Before?

If you are new to the process of developing information on quality, start with The Big Picture, which will introduce you to the larger task of undertaking a typical quality measurement project. This will provide you with the foundation for exploring more specific communication issues in the rest of the site. You may also want to start with this section if you have been producing information for other audiences (such as health plans, hospitals, or purchasers) but want to refocus your program on the information needs of consumers.

If you are an experienced sponsor of consumer-oriented quality measurement projects, or simply want to jump right in, return to the home page and pick the section (or subsection) that speaks to your most pressing concerns:

• What to Say: A discussion of what consumers need to hear about health care quality and the information you may be giving them.
• How to Say It: An in-depth look at strategies for presenting information in ways that facilitate comprehension and use.
• Into the Hands of Consumers: An overview of effective strategies for distributing information to consumers and supporting their efforts to use the information to make decisions.
• Refining What You Do: A review of testing and evaluation methods that help you assess and improve your approach.

Check out the Site Map for a more detailed view of all the subjects covered in the site, or use the Search feature. Many examples that illustrate different approaches are provided, as well as links to other Web sites that offer more information.

Who Produced This Site?

The contents of this site were produced by the Work Group on Consumer Health Information, a group of researchers with expertise in quality reporting, current sponsors of reporting projects, and recognized experts from related fields.

The Work Group was convened by a trio of Federal Government agencies with substantial interest in these issues:

• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
• Office of Personnel Management (OPM).