TalkingQuality

Mission

TalkingQuality represents the Agency’s ongoing effort to support and guide the many organizations that produce and disseminate consumer reports on the quality of care offered by health care providers (e.g., hospitals, health plans, medical groups, nursing homes, and individual physicians).

Relevance

Sponsors of consumer reports on health care quality share a common challenge: How to convey comparative information in a way that is easy for consumers to understand and interpret, motivates consumers to use it, and enables consumers to apply it to their own health care choices.

Products

TalkingQuality is a comprehensive guide to planning, creating, and promoting awareness and use of consumer-friendly quality information. It combines innovative ideas for communicating complex information to consumers, information on relevant research findings, and real-world examples. TalkingQuality also includes examples of comparative reports on health care quality and costs.

Audience

TalkingQuality’s resources are directed at public, nonprofit, and commercial organizations that are seeking to educate and inform health care consumers about their options with respect to health plans and providers of care, such as physicians, nursing homes, hospitals, medical groups and developers.

Participating Agencies and Institutions

TalkingQuality has benefited from input from researchers associated with the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS™) Consortium as well as an Editorial Board that included experts in public reporting and representatives of report developers in the public and private sector.