About

WhyNotTheBest.org was created by The Commonwealth Fund, and in January 2015, was transferred to IPRO, a national organization providing a full spectrum of healthcare assessment and improvement services. It is a free resource for health care professionals interested in tracking performance on various measures of health care quality. It enables organizations to compare their performance against that of peer organizations, against a range of benchmarks, and over time. Case studies and improvement tools spotlight successful improvement strategies of the nation’s top performers. A regional map shows performance at the county, HRR, state, and national levels.

WhyNotTheBest.org includes process-of-care measures, patient satisfaction measures (from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems), readmission rates, mortality rates, and average reimbursement rates. All of these performance measures are publicly reported on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Web site, Hospital Compare, and include data from nearly all U.S. hospitals. WhyNotTheBest.org also includes data on the incidence of central line-associated bloodstream infections, from over 1,500 hospitals across the nation. It also includes measures assessing whether and to what extend hospitals have adopted electronic medical records (from the American Hospital Association survey), as well as measures of population health and utilization and costs, from the Institute of Medicine. Finally, the site includes performance data for a subset of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Inpatient Quality Indicators (IQIs), Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs), and Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs). Currently, we have such data for the majority of hospitals in 12 states. For further information on the particular measures, please see Methodology.

We will continue to add new measure sets and develop additional functionality over time. If you would like to provide feedback on the site, make a suggestion for improvement, or If you are having technical problems with the site, please contact wntb-support@ipro.us.

WhyNotTheBest.org is pleased to be recognized as a “Health Data All Star.” Health Data All Stars is a directory of 50 prominent domestic resources for health data at the federal, state and local levels housed on the Health Data Consortium’s website. To compile the directory, consortium leaders spoke with leading health researchers, government officials, entrepreneurs, advocates and others to identify the health data resources that matter most.