IPRO, a leading nonprofit healthcare quality improvement and evaluation organization, has taken over from The Commonwealth Fund a major online resource for measuring the performance of 5,723 hospitals in the U.S.
Created by IPRO in 2008 for The Commonwealth Fund, the WhyNotTheBest.org resource has been used by tens of thousands of health care professionals to compare hospital performance and to access improvement tools. Effective January 2015, The Commonwealth Fund will transfer ownership and management of WhyNotTheBest.org to IPRO.
“IPRO has been an outstanding partner in acquiring and vetting data, hosting the site, and providing technical assistance to users, according to David Blumenthal, M.D, President of The Commonwealth Fund. “IPRO helped us test a theory: that making hospital performance data readily available and easy to use could both facilitate and spur efforts to improve U.S. health care. That experiment has been a success.“
According to IPRO’s Chief Executive Officer Theodore O. Will: “For all who rely on WhyNotTheBest.org for quarterly data updates, benchmarking, and tracking trends, nothing will change. The site will continue to be freely available to all.” Starting next year, users will begin to receive email alerts announcing when new data are available from IPRO, instead of from The Commonwealth Fund.
WhyNotTheBest.org is recognized as a “Health Data All Star” in a directory of 50 prominent domestic resources for health data at the federal, state and local levels. The directory was compiled by the Washington DC-based Health Data Consortium (www.healthdataconsortium.org), with input from leading researchers, government officials, entrepreneurs and advocates.
The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation that aims to promote a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable, including low-income people, the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults. The Fund carries out this mandate by supporting independent research on health care issues and making grants to improve health care practice and policy. An international program in health policy is designed to stimulate innovative policies and practices in the United States and other industrialized countries.
Now celebrating its 30th anniversary as an independent not-for-profit, IPRO is a national organization providing a full spectrum of healthcare assessment and improvement services that foster more efficient use of resources and enhance healthcare quality to achieve better patient outcomes. Founded in 1984, IPRO is highly regarded for the independence of its approach, the depth of its knowledge and experience, and the integrity of its programs. IPRO holds contracts with federal, state and local government agencies, as well as private-sector clients, in more than 33 states and the District of Columbia