Why Evaluate a Health Care Quality Reporting Project?
Just as report sponsors hope that health care providers and plans will use data on quality to improve their performance, you need to gather and use data to improve your reporting efforts over time. Experienced report sponsors approach their reporting initiatives with a developmental perspective: They become both more ambitious and more refined in their approach over time by learning from each of their experiences.
The benefits of evaluating your reporting project include the following:
- You learn what worked and didn’t.
- You identify the specific strategies and approaches that you should continue as well as those you should drop or change.
- You can determine whether your expectations were too ambitious to achieve within the time you allotted; this could lead to both better focused efforts and more realistic objectives.
- You have the information you need to become more effective over time.
- You have information you can share with your partners, your funders, and others that can strengthen your base of support or help you demonstrate that you need to make changes.
- You can share what you learn with others doing this work, either informally or formally, so the field as a whole moves forward.
All participants in a report card project will reach conclusions about the relative success or failure of the project. A systematic evaluation helps ensure that those conclusions are based on objective data rather than instinct or opinion alone.
Also in "Assess Your Reporting Project"
- Why You Should Evaluate Your Reporting Project
- What You Can Evaluate
- Elements of an Evaluation Plan
- Applying Lessons Learned
- Recommended Reading on Evaluation
