Many of America's best hospitals, businesses and leading governmental organizations have been working for years to provide consumers with information on hospital quality. They are hoping we will compare quality information even before we might ever need to choose a hospital.

Well before the recent Wall Street Journal article, How to Size Up Your Hospital, made headlines of this work, some of America’s leading health researchers had been championing the cause. Judith Hibbard’s 2004 Health Affairs article, Moving Toward A More Patient-Centered Health Care Delivery System, pushed readers to understand that quality-of-care measurement had not kept pace with the shift toward approaches that “rely on patients to contain costs and improve quality.”

In addition to linking to the Healthcare Compare website, the WSJ article by Theo Francis provides a great table, a good overview and links to many of the leading hospital quality "comparison shopping" sites.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) site is an especially good place to start asking “How can I choose the best quality hospital for the care I need?” It provides direct links to many of the quality reports in each state.

If you're in one of the states leading the health quality information discussion, you may even find better information. From Maine to California consumers already have a good amount of comparative data online.