Quality of hospital care in the United States is improving nearly 3 percent annually, remaining the highest rate of quality improvement among the major health care delivery settings, according to the National Healthcare Quality Report 2008 (NHQR), which was released in May by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

However, patient safety reported a setback, with a 1-percent decline year-on-year, according to the report.

The NHQR is built on 220 measures categorized across four dimensions of quality: effectiveness, patient safety, timeliness, and patient centeredness.

In the 2008 report, AHRQ found that quality in health care is still substandard, although it has been improving at a slow pace.

In addition, the agency highlighted that quality measurement in health care, though evolving, still requires more work. For instance, there's not sufficient data to measure quality in health care.

To ensure that relevant data are collected regularly, systematically, and unobtrusively, AHRQ calls for a reliable infrastructure in health care information technology (HIT). This can be a challenge as the high costs of HIT implementation to health care organizations often delay the quality measurement contributions that an effective HIT would otherwise offer, AHRQ states.

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