AHRQ's Quality Challenge

On Monday, April 4, 2005, AHRQ hosted "Improving Health Care for All Americans: Celebrating Success, Measuring Progress, Moving Forward." The national summit in Washington, DC, showcased successful national, regional, and local efforts to improve health care quality and reduce racial and ethnic disparities.

Select for a video summary of the summit (14 minutes) or a video presentation of Dr. Clancy's speech (25 minutes) with transcripts.

AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D., issued a call to action to the more than 200 meeting attendees. She urged them to work together to accept a new quality challenge to ensure that "every dollar we invest in health care buys a dollar's worth of value... so that Americans don't just have the best health care in the world, they actually get the best quality health care, consistently, in their own hospitals and physicians' offices."

State-Level Data Compilations

In conjunction with the meeting, AHRQ released State-level health care quality data compilations based on the congressionally mandated 2004 National Healthcare Quality Report to help State health officials more easily identify areas where they are doing well and those where quality improvement may be needed.

These data include:

• State Ranking Tables that show how well each State is performing on 14 selected measures of health care quality that are featured in the 2004 Quality Report and for which there are data from all 50 States and the District of Columbia.
• State Summary Tables that provide a complete listing of the entire set of about 100 quality measures for all States and DC.
• State Snapshots that give more detail on specific measures, including two specific examples in which the health care system of a particular State is doing well and two in which it might be able to improve.