New Approach to Assessing Clinical Quality of Care for Women

This article describes some of the attributes of a new system for assessing the quality of care for women. This system represents an improvement over existing methods because it provides greater flexibility in evaluating different levels within the health care system, focuses on individuals' overall experiences with health care over a 2-year period, emphasizes process measure which are more useful for accountability purposes, and contains a sufficiently large number of process indicators across a substantial number of preventive, acute, and chronic care services to fairly represent the quality of care delivered.