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.