Understanding Your Health

One way of measuring quality in primary care is by looking at the care that a doctor gives to each patient, and comparing it to a set of national standards. The standards - called clinical quality measures - tell us what high quality health care should look like in a doctor's office. Comparing doctors to standards shows us how consistently each one does at delivering care to patients.

When you search for doctors' offices on this website, you can compare how well each performed on 13 clinical quality measures for adult primary care, and  9 for pediatric primary care. 

Having this information can help you make a more informed choice when choosing a doctor's office. You also can use it to improve the quality of your own health care. Doctors also use this information to know how they can make the care they give even better.

The health topics in this resource section relate directly to the clinical quality measures this website reports on. The clinical quality measures we report on this site were developed by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a national non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of healthcare in America. Doctors' offices, hospitals, and most other health care organizations around the country use these same measures to track the quality of care they are providing. And, doctors' offices across Massachusetts voluntarily provide us with their results on these measures to report to you.