Quality Health Care is More than What Happens in the Doctor’s Office

What does high quality health care mean to you�as a patient, a family member, a taxpayer, and an American?

High quality care is about more than getting better when you are sick.�It means getting an appointment with your doctor when you need one, and getting to spend enough time with them to discuss the decisions that affect your care.�

It means all of your doctors talking to each other, so that you don�t have to do the same test over again or be on your own to figure out if prescriptions from two different doctors are safe to take together.�

It means never having to worry that going to the hospital to treat one illness will expose you to catching another one.�

It means knowing how to stay healthy and keeping small health problems from becoming bigger ones.

And it means that we have a health care system that uses our dollars wisely so that care is affordable.

Making sure that every American receives this kind of high-quality health care all the time takes a lot of people working together.� The United States has the most highly-skilled doctors and nurses in the world, but they can�t do this alone.� It takes patients, insurance companies, employers, communities, and health care providers all being on the same page.

That�s why the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, called for a National Quality Strategy so that we�re all focused on the same goals.� Last March, after talking to patients, providers and stakeholders from around the country, we released the first-ever National Quality Strategy and focused the nation�s attention on 6 priorities for improving health care quality.�

And we�re building on that work.�� Today, we announced our progress on the National Quality Strategy. For each of our shared priorities, we have nationwide initiatives � happening in all 50 states � to improve health care quality.�We�ve picked key measures to hold the system accountable for truly improving quality, not just talking about it.����

And there�s more to come. The National Quality Strategy isn�t just a piece of paper that�s going to sit on the shelf and collect dust. It represents just some of the actions we�re taking to ensure that Americans have access to affordable health coverage and high-quality health care that they need and deserve.

To read more about the National Quality Strategy and what we�re doing to improve health care quality, visit this page.