Measuring and improving quality in university hospitals in Canada: The Collaborative for Excellence in Healthcare Quality

• This was the first pan-Canadian collaborative to develop a common framework and agree on a set of quality of care performance measures for university hospitals.
• The aim was to achieve higher quality of patient care in university hospitals across Canada.
• This collaborative was successful in engaging health care leaders in working on initiatives to improve performance in university hospitals.

Measuring and monitoring overall health system performance is complex and challenging but is crucial to improving quality of care. Today’s health care organizations are increasingly being held accountable to develop and implement actions aimed at improving the quality of care, reducing costs, and achieving better patient-centered care. This paper describes the development of the Collaborative for Excellence in Healthcare Quality (CEHQ), a 5-year initiative to achieve higher quality of patient care in university hospitals across Canada. This bottom-up initiative took place between 2010 and 2015, and was successful in engaging health care leaders in the development of a common framework and set of performance measures for reporting and benchmarking, as well as working on initiatives to improve performance. Despite its successes, future efforts are needed to provide clear national leadership on standards for measuring performance.