The Market and Policy Monitor (MPM) program's Provider and Insurer Performance objective advances reporting on health care provider and insurer performance. Health care providers do a better job when the quality of their work can be measured and rewarded. Although this is a frequent topic of discussion, there is little consensus on how best to accomplish it. CHCF promotes responsible performance reporting, both as an incentive for quality improvement and as a way to track its progress. That commitment has led to the development of such websites as CalHospitalCompare.org, which rates quality of care, patient experience, and safety measures for more than 240 California hospitals, and CalQualityCare.org, which rates long term care providers throughout the state and helps consumers choose among options such as nursing homes, home health care agencies, and assisted living facilities.

Key Initiatives, Accomplishments, and Next Steps 

Toward these ends, the MPM program has developed the following projects:

CalHospitalCompare.org and CalQualityCare.org: Continued support for public reporting on quality of care in hospitals and in long term care settings, expanding where needed to include new measures and provider categories that are of value to consumers.

• Added all but one of the remaining public hospitals to the California Hospital Assessment and Reporting Taskforce (CHART) to facilitate performance reporting through CalHospitalCompare.org.
• Reinforced the importance of participation in CalHospitalCompare.org by executing a targeted, nine-month outreach campaign in two California communities: Sacramento and San Diego. This campaign produced more than 150,000 click-throughs to the site and leveraged much of the "creative" developed for a similar past campaign.
• Launched a project with the California Department of Social Services to collect information and publicly report more comprehensive data on residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFEs), the fastest growing segment of the long term care industry.

Next steps include:

• Supporting increased transparency of long term care for the developmentally disabled by incorporating into CalQualityCare.org information on intermediate care facilities and new data on RCFEs.
• Continued improvements on data display on CalHospitalCompare.org and CalQualityCare.org, conduct usability testing for CalQualityCare.org.
• Continued expansion of available hospital quality measures, with primary focus on those that can be collected through existing data sources.

Physician-level performance reporting: Fill gaps in current reporting efforts by encouraging the collection and reporting of outcomes in areas important to patients (such as orthopedics, maternity, and oncology).

• Working with national organizations to encourage the development and spread of performance measurement standards, particularly in new areas of consumer interest.
• Next steps include moving from planning to implementation of a three-site California Joint Replacement Registry pilot.
  

For More Information

Return to the MPM Goal and Objectives page.
Read about MPM Objective 1: Policy and Market Trends.