Health Care Quality and Safety: Organizations

The North Carolina Association for Healthcare Quality was founded in 1979 to provide an educational and professional organization, develop and provide continuing education, and provide a means whereby individuals working in quality assessment/improvement activities could associate to promote the sharing of knowledge.

The Center's vision is to lead North Carolina hospitals to become the safest and highest quality hospitals in the United States. The North Carolina Center for Hospital Quality and Patient Safety is guided in its operation by the Institute of Medicine's six aims for improvement and therefore, its core focus is to make healthcare safe, effective, efficient, patient-centered, timely and equitable for all of North Carolina.

Data on all North Carolina hospitals is available on this site.

The Office of Human Research Ethics (OHRE) is responsible for ethical and regulatory oversight of research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that involves human subjects. OHRE supports and oversees the work of the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).

The Office of Clinical Trials processes contracts with private industry and other entities to perform clinical trials at UNC-Chapel Hill. Administrative functions have been centralized to refine procedures, improve efficiency and communication, coordinate efforts between departments and schools, and to provide accurate tracking of contracts and accounts. OCT also provides training and standardized policies and procedures for managing the clinical trials process.

The Funding Information Portal is a central repository of resources maintained by the Graduate Funding Information Center and the Office of Research Development that aids UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students in seeking information on funding sources for independent research, collaborative projects, fellowships, program development, and other scholarly activities.

NC TraCS is one of 55 medical research institutions working together as a national consortium to improve the way biomedical research is conducted across the country. The consortium, funded through the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), shares a common vision to reduce the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients, and to engage communities in clinical research efforts.

AHRQ is the health services research arm of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, complementing the biomedical research mission of the National Institutes of Health. The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems (CAHPS) program is a public-private initiative to develop standardized surveys of patients experiences with ambulatory and facility-level care. The surveys offer national benchmarks for quality measures that are of interest to researchers and individual hospitals.

This federal agency offers free access to standardized information on the quality of hospitals nationwide.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is an independent not-for-profit organization helping to lead the improvement of health care throughout the world. Founded in 1991 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, IHI works to accelerate improvement by building the will for change, cultivating promising concepts for improving patient care, and helping health care systems put those ideas into action.

This nonprofit organization, which is responsible for accrediting hospitals, provides free access to comparative information on the quality of hospitals across the country.

This nonprofit organization publishes free information on how well hospitals nationwide meet certain standards for patient safety and quality.

The National Committee for Quality Assurance is a private, not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. Since its founding in 1990, NCQA has been a central figure in driving improvement throughout the health care system, helping to elevate health care quality issues to the top of the national agenda. Uses HEDIS measures that address a broad range of health issues. HEDIS is a tool used by health plans to measure performance on important dimensions of care and service.

The National Quality Forum (NQF) is a not-for-profit membership organization created to develop and implement a national strategy for health care quality measurement and reporting. Established as a public-private partnership, the NQF has broad participation from all parts of the health care system.

Partnering to Heal is a computer-based, interactive learning tool for clinicians, health professional students, and patient advocates. The training highlights effective communication about infection control practices and what it means to help create a “culture of safety” in healthcare institutions.