This landmark public-private partnership will create a shared national strategy to give hospital performance information to the public using a common set of measures and priorities that relate to medical conditions or aspects of care. It marks an important first step in developing predictable, useful and understandable quality information about hospital patient care and outcomes.

The goals of this initiative are to:

* Provide the public with meaningful, relevant and easily accessible information about hospital quality;

* Foster hospital and physician efforts to improve care, while streamlining or replacing duplicative and burdensome hospital reporting requirements now in place;

* Standardize data collection priorities; and

* Provide hospitals with a sense of predictability about public reporting expectations.

The American Hospital Association (AHA), the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH) are launching this initiative, with the support of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services(CMS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Quality Forum (NQF), AARP and the AFL-CIO.

The initiative will provide a strong foundation for identifying and using a standard set of valid, reliable and comparable hospital quality measures that can be used across federal, state and private sector-based quality improvement efforts. This initiative will use the medical conditions or aspects of care to be described in an upcoming report from the Institute of Medicine. Specific performance measures will be drawn from those endorsed by the NQF. To begin, hospitals will report 10 measures approved in common by CMS, JCAHO and NQF.

All of the participating organizations have agreed to use a common set of medical conditions or aspects of care as the basis for reporting and measuring the quality of hospital care. Furthermore, the hospital associations are encouraging their members to participate, and to voluntarily share with the public performance measures that will be created via this initiative.

Technical information about quality improvement activities will be available through federally funded Medicare Quality Improvement Organizations in each state and through JCAHO. CMS, JCAHO and AHRQ will provide technical assistance with the quality measures, foster quality improvement and assist with making the information accessible and understandable to the public.