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Welcome and OrientationWelcome to TalkingQuality, a site that supports efforts to educate and inform consumers about health care quality. About This SiteThe 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 SiteThis 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:
What Is IncludedThe 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:
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 IncludedWhile 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:
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. 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. 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 InformationYou 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 StartWhere 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 organizationsfrom those that handle every component of a quality information project to those that simply direct their constituencies to reliable sources of information.
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:
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:
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