Building a national data repository to measure and improve health center quality

Community health centers provide access to high-quality care for underserved populations and have a history of success with quality improvement initiatives, due to their mission and data reporting requirements. Investments in the health center infrastructure can bolster efforts to create a Nationwide Health Information Network to better utilize the available data. Aggregation, stratification by health center type, and use of patient-level quality data enable the development of quality measures that can be used to target health center resources and further improve quality. Health centers are fertile testing grounds for strategies to utilize data and performance measures to fuel quality improvements.