The new Community Checkup website
Data is a foundational element in transforming the health care system, which is why the Community Checkup has played such an important role in our work since its first release in 2008. We know that data by itself is insufficient to move the market. Data must be translated into information to drive action and outcomes in the market. With the introduction of the new Community Checkup website last month, the Alliance took another major step forward in moving data toward action.
The relaunched Community Checkup site allows visitors to interact with the data in groundbreaking new ways, thanks to the Tableau technology that powers the site. Users are able to do individualized comparisons among geographies and facilities, selecting the measures that are of interest to them. Results can be viewed as graphs or tables, and for the first time on the website the Alliance is able to show performance against the national 90th percentile, the standard to which we think our state should strive.
In addition, a step-by-step tool helps guide consumers through the process of selecting the medical home that best meets their needs. We have also called out interesting results as highlights, to tell stories from the data.
The Alliance hopes that this degree of interactivity will help inform the decisions of all the stakeholders in our health care system. Purchasers can use information from the site to help with their benefit strategies. Providers can use the site to compare their performance against those of their peers and identify areas for improvement. Consumers can use the site to understand variation in quality and choose a medical group or hospital that will serve their needs.
We already know that our community relies upon the Community Checkup as a source of objective information about the quality and value of care in our state. One recent example of that was Seattle Business Magazine’s use of our rankings to honor the high-performing medical groups in our state. Based on our rankings of medical groups with 15 or more reportable results in the Community Checkup, Group Health (now Kaiser Permanente) and Virginia Mason were awarded first and second place respectively in the magazine’s Leaders in Health Care awards. We were pleased to help honor the two medical groups selected as the top performers in this category on the night of the event, and also to acknowledge them as founding supporters of the Alliance over a decade ago.
I encourage you to visit the new site and to spend time taking advantage of the new interactivity it offers. (As a reminder, the site is best viewed from a laptop or desktop computer.) We welcome your feedback and look forward to growing the site in the months to come.