Hospital Quality Alliance

The Hospital Quality Alliance: Improving Care through Information (HQA) 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.

The goal of the program is to identify a robust set of standardized and easy-to-understand hospital quality measures that would be used by all stakeholders in the healthcare system in order to improve quality of care and the ability of consumers to make informed healthcare choices. An important element of the collaboration, Hospital Compare, a website tool developed to publicly report credible and user-friendly information about the quality of care delivered in the nation’s hospitals, debuted on April 1, 2005, at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov and www.medicare.gov.