Distribute Your Health Care Quality Report to Consumers

Long before you have comparative information to distribute, you need to be thinking about how and when to get it into the hands of consumers. Your objective is to place your report where your audience can find it quickly and easily and in a location that reinforces their trust in its benefits.

There are several related issues to consider:

• Media for a Quality Report: What medium—e.g., paper, Web—will you use to deliver the information? How will you package the information? Will it stand alone or be incorporated into other information?
• Placement and Distribution Channels: Where will you put the information? What channels can you use to get the information into the hands of your audience?
• Timing: How will you make the information available when people need it? Is there an ideal time to make the information available—e.g., during an open enrollment period? Is this timeframe achievable?

The answers to the first three sets of questions will affect how much time you have to produce the report as well as the kinds of measures and depth of content you can include. For example:

• If the goal is to release a performance report in early fall so that health plan enrollees have it in time for the open enrollment season, you may not have enough time to conduct your own survey of enrollees. But you could ask your plans to share their HEDIS^® scores, which include results of the CAHPS^® survey.
• If the most sensible way to package the performance information is to integrate it into other materials, you will have to build into your plan time to coordinate with the originators of those materials. You will also be faced with space constraints that would not be as necessary in a stand-alone document. This may affect the way you present the data or how much data you can include.

Also, how you go about distributing your report and your level of success are closely related to your efforts to make people aware of the information and motivated to use it. To learn more about what you can do to increase awareness and use of your quality report, go to Promote Your Report.