Seattle, Wa — Quality is increasingly recognized as crucial to health care reform, and the Puget Sound Health Alliance – with a $50,000 grant from The Regence Foundation – is poised to securely deliver private performance results to clinics via the Web to help them improve patient care.

“Quality data only matters if you can use it,” said Mike Alexander, Regence Foundation Board Chair. “This project from Puget Sound Health Alliance puts performance reports in the hands of clinics so they can use it to improve patient care, while keeping the data confidential and secure.”

The Regence Foundation’s grant – one of three technology grants awarded in July – helps the Puget Sound Health Alliance build on the usefulness of its first Community Checkup report about how often patients receive care that meets national standards for certain conditions.  The report results are intended to motivate everyone to do their part to promote better patient health and reduce the risk of complications and more severe illness.

Specifically, the grant will fund the building of a secure Web-based portal to provide participating clinics with immediate, secure access to all results for their specific clinic, including data regarding individual providers.  The public Community Checkup report does not show individual results, but instead offers results for clinic locations and clinic systems.  Providers also have the opportunity to see the draft report before it is released publicly.

Clinics whose results were included in the Alliance’s first Community Checkup, released in January, find the performance reports to be valuable tools to refine their clinical improvement processes, identify and start new patient-support programs, and guide overall quality improvement.

Future Community Checkup reports will be expanded to include results for many more clinics in the region, making the Puget Sound Health Alliance’s current manual report generation and distribution process unworkable. Regence’s grant to help build the secure data portal will make the performance report generation process more efficient, giving all of the clinics listed in the report access to their results whenever they need to use the information.

“The Alliance’s secure Web portal project aligns perfectly with the Foundation’s goal to leverage innovative technology as a way to improve health care quality and to promote positive transformation of the health care system,” said Alexander.