In the 2006 edition of its annual National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality finds that the rate of improvement across 42 core measures of quality ranged from a high of 7.8 percent (hospital acute care) to only 1 percent (nursing home and home health care). Improvements are not occurring across all aspects of the health care system and are highly variable across the states. The Commonwealth Fund's Commission on a High Performance Health System believes it will take an organized health system and expanded access to care to address many of the deficiencies in performance illustrated in the NHQR. National standards of care and performance benchmarks are essential to this effort.
