Health Care Quality Measurement in the Care of Patients With Cirrhosis

In recent years, there has been increasing emphasis by the US government on health care quality assessment and improvement. Increased funding for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has led to new initiatives by the agency to achieve its mission of improving the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for Americans. After expanding its support of health information technology initiatives in 2004, the agency established the Effective Health Care Program in 2005 to conduct comparative effectiveness reviews and provide understandable and actionable information for patients, clinicians, and policy makers. The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 established a system of patient safety organizations and a national patient safety database. More recently, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, known as the “Stimulus Package,” created the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness and Research and allocated $1.1 billion for “comparative effectiveness research” to provide patients, clinicians, and others with evidence-based information to make informed decisions about health care.