INTRODUCTION TO QUALITY ASSURANCE AND QUALITY MANAGEMENT Health care systems in the United States continue to move into an age of public transparency regarding their quality and safety of care, their patient outcomes, and also their patient satisfaction levels. Consumers of health care services are now arguably the most informed they have ever historically been when it comes to making the choice of where they want to receive their health care services. So much information is available online to help consumers research a single hospital or compare multiple health care facilities at once! Are you aware of how public the data is for hospitals’ quality, safety, outcomes, and satisfaction? Using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “Hospital Compare” website at https://www.medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html, locate the data for two hospitals of interest to you. You may choose the two that are closest to your current location (or home location if deployed), but any facilities may be chosen. Run the hospital comparison, and then carefully study each portion of the review and ratings data for the two facilities. Then: 1. Analyze the quality, safety, outcomes, and satisfaction data for each of the two hospitals that you selected. What stands out in the data of each hospital from a managerial and also a consumer viewpoint? 2. What are the identified strengths and identified weaknesses of each facility in terms of their quality data? 3. If you were the future health care manager of these facilities, how could your concerns for each facility’s data be addressed? Be specific in your explanations.