Performance reporting to help organizations promote quality improvement.

In healthcare, a great deal of time, money and energy go into producing public reports for a wide range of audiences. Reporting strategies often target audiences like the general public, whose behaviour is not readily changed by the information in report cards. However, when it comes to effectively targeting groups that can actually use the data to achieve significant impacts, one audience stands out from the rest: health system managers and providers, who can interpret and apply performance data to improve the quality of care their organizations deliver. The evidence behind performance reports was recently summarized in Evidence Boost for Quality, a special subseries of Evidence Boost, produced by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation to showcase healthcare issues where research indicates a preferred course of action in health services management and policy. To access archived issues of Evidence Boost, visit <http://www.chsrf.ca/mythbusters/eb_e.php>.