Guidance for sponsors of consumer reports on health care quality
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About the Health Care Report Card Compendium
The Report Card Compendium is a searchable list of over 200 health care quality reports for consumers. The Web and print reports included in the Compendium cover the quality of health plans, hospitals, medical groups, individual physicians, nursing homes, and other providers of care.
The Compendium is meant to be wide-ranging and illustrative of a variety of strategies. While the entries are reviewed against the criteria explained below, they do not go through a vetting process. Consequently, while some entries are good examples of what to do, others are equally compelling examples of what report sponsors should avoid. The decision to include or exclude a report from the Compendium is not a judgment on the part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of the effectiveness or value of any report.
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Defining “Report Card"
The term "report cards" refers to information sources and tools designed to enable health care consumers to compare quality of care and other characteristics of health plans or providers. While this term has not been embraced by all sponsors of comparative quality information or researchers in this field, the developers of the TalkingQuality site agreed to use this language because it is concise and universally understood.
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Purpose of the Report Card Compendium
To serve as a reference. The Compendium was developed as a resource for the many organizations that sponsor reports on health care quality. It can help report sponsors answer the following questions:
- Who has been issuing reports on the quality of different aspects of the health care system?
- What kinds of information have they been reporting?
- How have they been presenting the data?
Report card developers can review reports in the Compendium to explore the scope and types of information they might want to cover as well as various approaches to presenting comparative data.
To illustrate guidance presented in TalkingQuality. The Compendium supplements the guidance provided on the TalkingQuality Web site by providing easy access to descriptions of each report as well as links to the reports and sample pages.
To help make connections. The Compendium provides contact information for each report to facilitate networking among report sponsors.
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Criteria for Inclusion in the Report Card Compendium
The Compendium includes reports that meet the following criteria:
- They are designed for consumers, defined as enrollees, employees, beneficiaries of Medicare or Medicaid, or the public at large.
- They are available to consumers. However, they do not have to be available to all consumers or available for free.
- They include comparative data on quality for more than one health care organization.
- They provide information about one of the following types of health care providers:
- Health plans.
- Hospitals (inpatient and outpatient care).
- Medical groups/clinics.
- Individual physicians.
- Managed behavioral health organizations.
- Nursing homes.
- Home health agencies.
- Dialysis facilities.
Publication date is not a criterion: Since these reports are meant to illustrate various ways to report information, the collection is not limited to current documents and tools. The oldest entries date back to 1996.
Note: Any report card that meets these criteria is eligible for inclusion. Inclusion of a report in the Compendium does not constitute an endorsement of the report in its entirety, or of any element in the report, by AHRQ.
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Types of Reports Excluded from the Compendium
The Compendium excludes the following types of reports:
- Reports on one institution’s performance, even if shown relative to a benchmark of some kind.
- Reports that offer only individual patients’ reviews of health plans or providers in their own words. While this kind of anecdotal information can be helpful to consumers, it does not lend itself to the kind of comparison possible with a validated and standardized measure of quality.
- Reports with only comparative information on cost or other measures not directly related to quality (e.g., descriptive measures, such as the number of beds in a hospital).
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Information Provided by the Report Card Compendium
The Compendium lists both printed and Web-based report cards produced since the mid-1990s.
The following information is provided for each entry:
- The name of the report sponsor.
- The title of the report.
- The subject of the report.
- Links to a Web site (when available) or an excerpt of the report.
- A profile with more details about the report (e.g., types of sponsors, geographic coverage, types of measures, presentation strategies).
The report card's sponsor granted permission for us to either link to their site or provide a sample page. The only exceptions were report cards whose sponsors no longer exist.
Access to real data: The Compendium itself does not include the actual quantitative data found in any given report card. All examples accessible through the Compendium are meant for illustrative purposes only. However, if you follow a link to a Web-based report or a sample page, you may see the comparative data provided in that report. Because the Compendium includes reports from the last 10 years, some of the information contained in the reports is no longer current.
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Submitting a Report to the Report Card Compendium
The Compendium is open to any organization that produces and disseminates reports with comparative quality information for consumers. Examples of report sponsors include public purchasers, employer coalitions, State agencies, health plans, provider associations, media organizations, health care quality organizations, and private vendors.
However, the Compendium does not include vendors that develop reports on behalf of other organizations, unless they also provide a separate report directly to consumers. Several reports developed by vendors for others are in the Compendium, but each is presented as a report of the sponsoring organization, not the vendor.
To learn more, go to Add Your Report.
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