title: Building a national data repository to measure and improve health center quality.
abstract: Community health centers provide access to high-quality care for underserved populations and have a history of success with quality improvement initiatives, due to their mission and data reporting requirements. Investments in the health center infrastructure can bolster efforts to create a Nationwide Health Information Network to better utilize the available data. Aggregation, stratification by health center type, and use of patient-level quality data enable the development of quality measures that can be used to target health center resources and further improve quality. Health centers are fertile testing grounds for strategies to utilize data and performance measures to fuel quality improvements.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Policy, School of Public Health and Health Services, George Washington University, Washington, District of Columbia 20006, USA.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Shin
authors.forename: Emily
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: Feygele
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Jacobs
authors.forename: Reed
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Tuckson
mesh_terms: D003151:Community Health Centers / Q000592:standards; D016208:Databases, Factual; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D014481:United States