At a Dec. 12 press briefing in Washington, AHA President Dick Davidson, joined by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Tom Scully, said that the initiative would begin by looking at 10 quality measures involving heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia.

"Providing high quality care demands that patients be informed partners in decisions about their care every step of the way," Davidson said in a statement released in conjunction with the press briefing. "Providing helpful information can only enhance a patient experience."

Other groups and agencies involved include the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Federation of American Hospitals, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Quality Forum, AARP and the AFL-CIO.

AHA said the overall goals of this initiative are to:

• Provide the public with meaningful, relevant and easily accessible information about hospital quality of care;
• 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.

Thompson said after the war on terrorism, health care is the number one concern of Americans, and he called on Davidson to encourage every hospital in the country to participate in the initiative.

"I am excited and proud to work with America's hospitals on this important step forward for the quality information movement," Thompson said. "In the past year, we joined with nursing homes to make quality information available on individual nursing facilities. We are eager to work with others throughout the health care sector to make quality disclosure a robust and helpful element throughout our health care system."

Thompson announced that HHS will also support the new hospital information effort with a three-state pilot project in Maryland, New York and Arizona. Conducted by CMS, with the Quality Improvement Organizations in each state, the pilot will test the most effective ways to communicate with consumers about hospital quality of care.

Scully said that this voluntary venture is "a big first step."

"As hospitals undertake this solid first step in public quality reporting, we want to help them determine how to make this data most helpful," said Scully. "Our pilot project will measure the real-world impact of the 10 initial quality measures."

He added that the data is expected to be publicly available on CMS' Web site, http://www.cms.hhs.gov, by the summer of 2003.