Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance creates health-care-quality website

The Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance, a coalition of Pennsylvania health care providers and insurers, has launched a website (www.phcqa.org) to provide their clients with more essential information about provided health care.

Photo: Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance creates health-care-quality website

The mission of the coalition is to enable consumers to compare hospital performance, allow health care professionals to evaluate and improve the quality of their patient care and help insurers to evaluate the performance of their provider networks.

The most interesting and valuable part of the site is “The Progress & Performance Report” which contains 20 health care quality measures reported by general acute care hospitals to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Joint Commission, and the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council.

The Progress & Performance Report is interested in four major clinical areas: heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and infection prevention. It goes without saying, that additional measures will be added into future versions of the reports.

The site provides information on a process measure that helps to assess a health care service provided to a patient, to assess adherence to recommendations for clinical practice based on evidence or consensus. And there is also information about an outcome measure that can be used to find out quality of care to the extent that health care services influence the likelihood of desired health outcomes.

Photo: www.piperreport.com