What is health care quality?

To achieve the best possible results, health care quality is:

• Doing the right thing (getting the medicines, tests, and help you need),
• Doing it at the right time (when you need them), and
• Doing it in the right way (with your health care providers using the methods known to work best).

Researchers measure health care quality in many ways, from how often people having surgery get an infection to how patients rate their experience. You can find scores based on these kinds of measures on this website. Depending on your needs, you may want to look at some or all of these scores when looking for a hospital, a doctor, or nursing home.