CMS launched the Quality Initiative to collect, measure, and report quality of care data in response to the Bush Administration's and the Department of Health and Human Services imperative to improve the quality of health care.

The CMS Quality Initiative aims include the desire to refine and standardize hospital data, data transmission, and performance measures in order to construct a single robust, prioritized and standard quality measure set for hospitals. The ultimate goal is that all private and public purchasers, oversight and accrediting entities, payers and providers of hospital care use the same measures in their public reporting activities.

Hospitals collect the data for the CMS quality measures by abstracting data from the hospitals' patient records. The measures used are based upon the quality measures endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF), Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The current measures are specific to measuring quality in the care areas of Heart Attack Care, Heart Failure Care, Pneumonia Care, and Surgical Care.

TBS loaded the data obtained from CMS into its proprietary statistical benchmarking application to provide the rankings of hospitals within various peer groups. TBS determined the Best Hospitals by benchmarking and ranking all hospitals nationwide on 19 of the 21 measures (AMI 7a and 8a excluded) for the data provided for the July 2006 to June 2007 timeframe. TBS utilized its Quality Benchmark Solution application to provide interactive comparisons of hospitals within multiple peer groups and assist healthcare providers in targeting areas for improvement.