Chapter 11. Measuring Success

Regional Coalition Collaboration Guide

An integral part of quality improvement is measuring the impact of improvement activities. Doing so demonstrates whether you are moving toward your vision and accomplishing your priorities. At this time, the six Better Quality Information sites do not have formalized measures for determining their success. However, they do use informal methods of gauging stakeholder satisfaction and measuring the coalition's effectiveness.

Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, for instance, measures its success in how many stakeholders want to continue participating in the coalition. In addition, the Massachusetts coalition has anecdotal information from the physician community on how it uses the coalition's data to encourage physicians or to create improvement projects. Consequently, one network has included a session in its annual meeting on how to improve the coalition's reports. The amount of positive press coverage the coalition receives and the number of press releases the media pick up also validate that people are paying attention to the Massachusetts Health Quality Partners' work.

The Massachusetts coalition also measures success through the amount of research funding it receives from outside the State and brand recognition, which is calculated by how many people know what "Massachusetts Health Quality Partners" or "MHQP" is and what it does. Finally, the coalition has research efforts underway to understand how practices use aspects of its data.

For the Center for Health Information and Research, because it is an academic research group, it measures success in funding secured through grants and contracts for service, its delivery of community reports to the Arizona community, and scholarly publications.

Page last reviewed April 2008
Internet Citation: Chapter 11. Measuring Success: Regional Coalition Collaboration Guide. April 2008. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://archive.ahrq.gov/professionals/quality-patient-safety/quality-resources/tools/collabguide/collabguide11.html