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alliance-blog

Alliance partners with Consumer Reports to disseminate health care quality information

Thanks to a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Alliance will be joining a new initiative to make information about health care quality broadly available to consumers. The effort, called The DOCTOR Project, brings together ten communities across the country to work to disseminate their quality data in partnership with Consumer Reports magazine, which will publish the data in special issues.

The Alliance was chosen because of its proven expertise in performance measurement and reporting. We continue to expand the Community Checkup, with results at the medical group and clinic level for three new counties—Skagit, Spokane and Whatcom—to be published in early 2015. We’ve added patient experience survey results for primary care providers in the Puget Sound region. And we continue to work to secure pricing data to present a fuller picture of the value of care in Washington.

Three communities—Minnesota, Massachusetts and Wisconsin—piloted the project with Consumer Reports. The special issues of the magazine, which is widely respected by consumers as an unbiased source of information, significantly increased the visibility of the work in those communities and the traffic that those community websites received.

The Alliance is already collaborating with Consumer Reports on our Choosing Wisely campaign, so we know firsthand the value of this partnership. We’re looking forward to making our quality results even more broadly available to Washington residents and to joining the national effort to increase transparency for consumers.

Published: December 22, 2014

About Washington Health Alliance

The Washington Health Alliance is a place where stakeholders work collaboratively to transform Washington state’s health care system for the better. The Alliance brings together organizations that share a commitment to drive change in our health care system by offering a forum for critical conversation and aligned efforts by stakeholders: purchasers, providers, health plans, consumers and other health care partners. The Alliance believes strongly in transparency and offers trusted and credible reporting of progress on measures of health care quality and value. The Alliance is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit with more than 185 member organizations. A cornerstone of the Alliance's work is the Community Checkup, a report to the public comparing the performance of medical groups, hospitals and health plans and offering a community-level view on important measures of health care quality (www.wacommunitycheckup.org).

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