Hospital Quality Alliance
The Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA): Improving Care through Information is a public-private collaboration to improve the quality of care provided by the nation's hospitals by measuring and publicly reporting on that care. This collaboration includes the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, and the Association of American Medical Colleges, and is supported by other organizations such as the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality, National Quality Forum, Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, American Medical Association, American Nurses Association, National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions, Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project, AFL-CIO and American Association for Retired Persons. The goal of the program is to identify a robust set of standardized and easy-to-understand hospital quality measures. An important element of the collaboration, HospitalCompare, is a website/web-tool developed to publicly report credible and user-friendly information about the quality of care delivered in the nation's hospitals.