A new project in California aims to establish a statewide report card for hospitals. The California HealthCare Foundation announced a $240,000 grant to the Institute for Health Policy Study at the University of California, San Francisco.
The institute has been charged with creating consensus on a comprehensive set of quality measures for all California hospitals and developing an implementation plan that will make the report card financially self-sustaining.
Collaborators include the California Institute for Health Systems Performance, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the National Quality Forum.
A foundation spokesman said hospitals support the initiative because they are "constantly bombarded with requests for information" and would like to report on just one set of measures.
The project, to be completed by early 2005, will involve more quality measures than the 10 being used in a CMS pilot in Arizona, Maryland and New York, the spokesman said. It also will incorporate the results of a national survey on patient perspectives on care, vetted as part of the CMS pilot and now undergoing final changes following a comment period.
