Making data about health care quality publicly available — and educating consumers to consider quality in their medical decisions — is essential to improve California’s health care system.

CHCF supports two websites for consumers:

• CalQualityCare.org¹, which focuses on long-term care providers
• CalHospitalCompare.org, which focuses on hospitals

Both provide one-stop shopping for ratings and other information on the quality of care provided along with tips and checklists for how to choose a health care provider, questions to ask, how to pay for care, and what to do if something goes wrong. The websites rely on publicly available data from state and federal sources to derive the ratings.

In 2002, the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) saw an overwhelming need to make long-term care information available and recognized that providing the information online is the most effective path. CHCF began sponsoring the project and a UCSF-SBS team provided the data content for the website, including developing the ratings methods and scoring the facilities. Over the next 14 years, CHCF supported the mission of sharing provider performance data, including hospitals and medical groups, with the public in an unbiased and freely available website.

In November 2016, the California Health Care Foundation handed management of CalQualityCare.org to the team at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) that has collected, analyzed, and provided the ratings since the inception of the site. Ratings for long-term care providers and facilities will continue to be found at CalQualityCare.org. For more information about CalQualityCare.org, contact Leslie Ross at the UCSF School of Nursing.

At the same time, hospital quality information was moved to CalHospitalCompare.org (though the CalQualityCare.org site can also route users there). The not-for-profit organization formerly known as the California Hospital Assessment and Reporting Taskforce (CHART) — a multistakeholder coalition of payers, employers, hospitals and consumer groups — will continue to support data collection and ratings for the site, as they have for many years. To minimize confusion, CHART is changing its name to match the website and will also be known as Cal Hospital Compare. For more information about CalHospitalCompare.org, contact Bruce Spurlock at Cynosure Health.

1. CalQualityCare.org is no longer in service.