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Your Guide to Choosing Quality Health Care

This information is for reference purposes only. It was current when produced and may now be outdated. Archive material is no longer maintained, and some links may not work. Persons with disabilities having difficulty accessing this information should contact us at: https://info.ahrq.gov. Let us know the nature of the problem, the Web address of what you want, and your contact information.

Please go to www.ahrq.gov for current information.

Summary


Your Guide to Choosing Quality Health Care was developed to help you make health care decisions using information about quality. The Guide is based on research about the information people want and need when choosing health plans, doctors, treatments, hospitals, and long-term care. These are the major decisions most people face at one time or another during their lives—either for themselves or for a loved one.


Your Guide to Choosing Quality Health Care shows how you can use information about quality to improve the quality of health care services you and your family receive. It describes quality measures including consumer ratings, clinical performance measures, and accreditation—what they are, where to find them, and how to use them. The Guide has checklists, questions, charts, and other tools to help you make the health care decisions that are right for you.

A plain, straight-text HTML version of the Guide (HTML files, 141 KB) is available for those who wish to excerpt and otherwise manipulate the contents for use in newsletters, brochures, other print products, and electronic versions. If you use the Guide for such purposes, please acknowledge in your product that it was adapted from information produced by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. To copy the HTML version, view each file and select "Edit" and "Save As" in your browser; then indicate where to save the file. Note that the HTML version consists of 12 files, including a JPG image file.

PDF Files require the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader™, which you can download free from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2_allversions.html

Current as of September 2002


The information on this page is archived and provided for reference purposes only.

 

AHRQ Advancing Excellence in Health Care