The availability of health care information for consumer use

This study assesses the current availability of health care cost and quality information at both the state and national levels. More than 130 sources were contacted, including all state commissioners of health and state hospital associations. Eighty-one percent of the responding states report provider-specific information to the public, 73% require providers to submit data to the state, and the department of health or a state health care commission is the data collection entity of 69% of the states. However ambitious or mature some state health care data initiatives have become, the comparative measures of provider performance are generally primitive, the data sources are unreliable in many cases, and the data sources and measures are widely variant across states.