The Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project, a coalition of more than 30 leading consumer, purchaser and labor organizations, seeks to make information from standardized measures readily available to employers, consumers and other purchasers of health care so that they can select high-quality providers and treatments.

Staff from AcademyHealth (formerly known as the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy) administered the project. AcademyHealth is a professional organization of health services researchers, policy analysts and health care practitioners in Washington.

Key Results

During the grant period, the Consumer and Purchaser Disclosure Project:

• Forged a new partnership among consumer, labor and purchaser organizations to advance the goal of performance transparency within the health care marketplace.
• Developed a framework for assessing performance measures from a consumer and purchaser perspective.
• Proposed an additional 27 performance measures for the hospital setting and increased the number ultimately adopted by the National Quality Forum. (The National Quality Forum is a public-private partnership formed in 1999 to develop and implement a national strategy for health care quality measurement and reporting.)
• Submitted comments to the National Quality Forum on various performance measures and implementation issues.
• Supported use of the national measurement set by stakeholders and identified key leverage points to initiate performance reporting.

Funding

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) supported this project through a grant of $55,240.