About Us
This Web site is the result of a partnership between two independent organizations dedicated to improving health care quality: the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) and the California Hospitals Assessment and Reporting Taskforce (CHART), a not-for-profit public benefit corporation. This site includes ratings for clinical care, patient safety, and patient experience for all acute care hospitals in the state of California with publicly available information. This represents 332 hospitals, and does not include psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, long-term acute care hospitals and specialty only hospitals. CHART has contracted with Truven Health Analytics to provide data support and analysis.
About CHART
The California Hospital Assessment and Reporting Taskforce (CHART) was established in 2004 to develop a statewide hospital performance reporting system using a multi-stakeholder collaborative process. The stakeholder group includes consumers; purchasers of health insurance, such as businesses and labor organizations; health plans; hospitals; physicians; nurses; health care quality experts from government and academic institutions; and regulators. CHART brings together all these relevant stakeholders in California health care to:
- Prioritize and select key aspects of hospital performance to measure and report
- Agree upon a uniform, scientifically valid approach to measurement for all California hospitals
- Collect and aggregate the data as defined and specified
- Provide hospitals and clinicians with valid measures and benchmarking data on which to base quality improvement efforts
- Report the performance of individual California hospitals to consumers, purchasers, and health plans
The project is governed by a multi-stakeholder board that consists of representatives from consumer organizations, health plans, purchasers, hospitals, CHCF, and the Association of California Nurse Leaders.
In 2011 the CHART board of directors moved to change the source of data collection from participating hospitals to publically available sources, thus making the role of CHART a data aggregator. In this new format CHART collects, analyzes, and scores data from various sources and aggregates it into hospital-specific reports. In doing so, consumers and other users no longer need to use numerous Web sites to obtain performance information when making decisions about their care.
Additional information about the original CHART project may be found on the California HealthCare Foundation California HealthCare Foundation site.
About the California HealthCare Foundation
The California HealthCare Foundation works as a catalyst to fulfill the promise of better health care for all Californians. We support ideas and innovations that improve quality, increase efficiency, and lower the costs of care. For more information, visit www.CHCF.org.
