Ensuring Health Care Quality

Providing quality patient care and clinical improvements has always been an integral part of the AAMC's tripartite mission of health care, research, and medical education. The AAMC will continue to actively work with its members and outside stakeholders to ensure that the physician workforce can provide patient-centered care to everyone in our increasingly diverse society.

Hospital Compare
Members of the Hospital Quality Alliance have launched Hospital Compare, a Web site that provides the public with useful, easily accessible information on hospital quality of care to assist patients, families, and communities in making important health care decisions.

Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA)
The AAMC is a founding member of the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) a national public-private collaboration that is committed to making meaningful, relevant, and easily understood information about hospital performance accessible to the public and to informing and encouraging efforts to improve quality.

AAMC Comment Letter on 2009 Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (PDF, 16 pages)
On September 2, 2008, the AAMC provided comments to CMS on the inclusion of a teaching adjustment in the outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS). The AAMC additionally provides comments on the outpatient quality reporting program, proposed composite ambulatory payment classification (APC) groups for multiple imaging services, proposed payment rate for separately payable drugs and biologicals and charge compression, proposed changes to the cost report, outlier payments and the partial hospitalization program (PHP).

Hospital Field Unified Principles on Rewarding Performance Excellence (PDF, 3 pages)
In the continued effort to improve the quality and safety of care provided at hospitals, members of the hospital community came together to develop a common set of Principles for the implementation of Pay for Performance Programs.

Summary of Quality Provisions in the FY 2009 Medicare Inpatient Proposed Rule (PDF, 6 pages)
CMS proposes expanding the list of selected Hospital Acquired Conditions (HAC). CMS also proposes to add 43 new measures, and retire 1 measure for the FY 2009 reporting period. (PDF, 6 pages)

This page contains documents in Portable Document Format (PDF). The Adobe Acrobat® Reader® is required to view PDF documents. Download Acrobat® Reader®.