Alliance launches 2016 Community Checkup report
This week, the Alliance released its tenth version of the Community Checkup report, along with the second set of results for the Washington State Common Measure Set for Health Care Quality and Cost. In the report you will find that unwarranted variation continues to be a problem in our state. This pattern of significant variation underscores how important it is that we continue to measure, analyze and report results to target opportunities for improvement. The report also highlights areas of focus that are of particular importance to the State’s Healthier Washington initiative: well-child visits, diabetes care and behavioral health.
The Alliance had planned to release the results on a new interactive Community Checkup website, using Tableau’s powerful data visualization tools. Unfortunately, a few weeks before Thanksgiving we learned about significant technical issues that stood in the way of us delivering a highly interactive user experience while at the same time ensuring the security of the data. We are deeply sorry that we are unable to deliver the website as we had planned, but I know that you agree with me that we simply cannot release a new website without all technical issues resolved and the guarantee of a solid user experience and data security.
While we await the launch of the new website, we have worked hard to make a significant amount of the Community Checkup results available to you. In addition to the written 2016 Community Checkup Report, we have Common Measure Set results at a statewide level. We also have summary results by medical group, and detailed results for each county, each Accountable Community of Health (ACH) and each health plan. All of this information has been posted to our website, here: wahealthalliance.org/alliance-reports-websites/community-checkup/.
Due to the transition to the new website, we have chosen not to put the newest data on that site. In addition, we may have to disable the Community Checkup site at some point during the transition. If we do so, we will communicate with members before the site is disabled.
We remain excited about development of the new Community Checkup website and the leap forward that it represents for our work. We believe the greater interactivity and visualizations that will be available on the site will be groundbreaking in our state, and that they will help meet your needs and further advance transparency.