Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ): lessons learned.

The Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality demonstrated that seven hospitals, six multi-specialty physician groups, four health plans and nine employers from across the state can agree upon goals and work collaboratively to achieve them. Together they created: A public/private partnership to define common measures of health care quality that make sense to purchasers/consumers. A report that allows all health care providers to compare data against the measures reported, and evaluate their own performances. A tool that enables purchasers to educate their employees in making informed decisions in choosing and interacting with health care providers. A forward-looking approach for determining what effective, resonable health care will be in the future. The Collaborative has become a learning organization, expanding its capacity to create the quality improvement results to which its participants aspire.