News and Media

Welcome to Quality Buzz. Quality Buzz is dedicated to bringing you all the latest news and information to help you improve the quality of your health care. We update this section weekly and hope that it will become an important resource for you.

January 26, 2010 — What Are The Best Websites to Compare Facilities and Providers?

A shout out this week for the Informed Patient Institute. The IPI, as it is known, is a non-profit organization that is concerned about the quality of information available to consumers about health care quality and patient safety.

The IPI's website rates literally hundreds of websites that provide background, performance measures, or report cards on different types of health care facilities and professionals. The IPI staff rates each site based on criteria covering six areas – site content, timeliness, presentation, ease of use, information to make decisions and special features. Websites are assigned grades from A ("outstanding") to F ("not worth your time"). Equally useful are the comments made by IPI staff about each website. IPI promises to update its ratings annually.

IPI has an ambitious plan to rate on-line report cards for many other types of facilities and professionals, including urgent care centers, psychologists, etc. However, at the moment, it is limited to nursing homes and physicians.

The IPI website is among the new resources included on the Partnership's new website. Look for it to launch later this week. In our next Quality Buzz, we will give a tour of the exciting features available on our new site.

Back to Top