History and Mission

In 2001 several of the nation's leading health care purchasing coalitions started to discuss how to more effectively coordinate efforts to advance value-based purchasing.

The National Business Coalition on Health, the Employer Health Care Alliance Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, the Pacific Business Group on Health and the Midwest Business Group on Health led the discussion about how to improve the quality of health care as well as reduce inefficiencies in the system.

To get a better sense of the purchaser perspective, the Washington Business Group on Health (now the National Business Group on Health) agreed to survey their member employers to determine their interest in and priorities for collaboration. The results of this survey made a compelling case for a more coordinated effort among purchasers to promote performance improvement and transparency among health care providers.

In November 2001, these employers and coalitions agreed to work together to pursue the following goal:

Americans will be able to select hospitals, physicians, physician groups/delivery systems and treatments based on public reporting of nationally standardized measures for clinical quality (safe, timely, and effective), consumer experience, equity, and efficiency.¹

Purchasers quickly realized that consumer and labor organizations would be likely allies in working to achieve this goal, and the Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project was born.

Since that time – with financial support from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – the Disclosure Project has been an aggressive and active advocate to promote the rapid definition and implementation of a comprehensive national performance measurement set. Today, more than 30 of the nation's leading consumer, purchaser and labor organizations participate in and support the project and its goal, for a current list click here.

¹Institute of Medicine definitions:

Safe: Freedom from accidental injury. To improve patient safety, health care organization and professionals must establish and improve systems that minimize the likelihood of error, make visible those errors that do occur, and prevent or mitigate harm from errors that reach the patient.

Timely: The flow of care, free of undesired waits and delays for both those who receive care and those who give care. The process flows smoothly and waiting times are continually reduced for both patients and those who give care.

Effective: The disciplined use of systemically-acquired knowledge to provide services that are likely to benefit patients and refrain from providing services not likely to benefit patients.

Efficient: The continual reduction of waste in health care, especially waste stemming from errors and from overuse of ineffective tests, medications, procedures, technologies and other interventions. Waste includes any resource use that fails to help meet patients' needs, including materials, supplies, time, forms, measurements, reports, motion, duplicated efforts, ideas not used, and information that is lost.

Equitable: The care of populations and individuals. As a population level, the goal of a health care system is to improve health status for all Americans and to do so in a manner that reduces disparities among particular subgroups. For individuals, the provision of health care services should be based on individual needs and not on personal characteristics unrelated to their health condition. In particular, the quality of care should not differ solely because of such characteristics as gender, race, ethnicity, income, education, disability, sexual orientation, or location of residence.

Patient- Centered: Health care that respects and honors patients' individual wants, needs, and preferences, and that assures that individual patient's values guide all decisions.