What Role Do You Want in Developing a Health Care Quality Report?

There are many ways to go about producing and disseminating reports on health care quality. Some organizations choose to take on every component of a quality information project—the data collection, the analysis, the compiling of all content—while others focus on providing information that other sponsors have developed. Before you can flesh out the details of your reporting project, you’ll need to decide how involved in the process you want to be.

This page discusses three broad options and recommends relevant parts of the TalkingQuality site.

Do It All Yourself

Some sponsors want to take complete responsibility for producing quality scores, packaging the information (e.g., in a written report or on a Web site), distributing it to consumers, and promoting its use. This strategy requires the most effort and resources, but it also enables you to control how, what, when, and where you communicate to your audience.

If this describes your approach, you can find useful material and advice throughout TalkingQuality.

Repackage Existing Data

Some sponsors prefer to take existing data and adapt it to the needs of a specific audience. An example of repackaging would be using nationally available data on the performance of Medicare HMOs to create a user-friendly report on Medicare plans for older adults in a specific community.

This site offers a great deal of information to help you repackage data for your audience. For example:

• To present existing quality data more clearly, check out the advice and examples offered in the section called Translate Data Into Information.
• To better understand the kinds of quality measures and data that are available, review the section called Select Measures to Report.

Point to Other Information Sources

Rather than provide data themselves, some organizations point their constituencies to other credible sources of useful information.

If this is the approach you choose to take:

• Check out the section called Explain and Motivate, which suggests educational content you could be sharing with consumers and ways in which you can help them process and use the information they find.
• Explore the Informed Patient Institute Web site, which rates the usefulness of online health care report cards. This site is available at http://www.informedpatientinstitute.org.