About Us

Americans today have only a 55 percent chance of getting the right care, at the right time, for the right reason, at the right cost. That's no better than a toss of a coin. Women and minorities have even less of a chance of getting quality health care. We can do better.

The National Partnership for Women & Families provides technical assistance for Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s signature effort to improve the overall quality of health care in targeted communities, reduce racial and ethnic disparities and provide models for national reform. Each of the Aligning Forces communities has built its initiative around a core, multi-stakeholder leadership Alliance working to advance the goals and activities of AF4Q at the local level. These Alliances include participation from physicians, nurses, patients, consumers and consumer groups, purchasers, hospitals, health plans, safety net providers and others.

We work with the Alliances to assist their efforts to improve the health care in their communities in three areas:

• Consumer engagement: ensuring consumers are actively involved in the work of the Alliances to represent the patient perspective and encouraging patients to take an active role in their health care by seeking out reliable information as they make choices about their doctors and hospitals.
• Quality improvement: advocating for doctors and hospitals to systematically develop solutions to prevent misuse, overuse, and underuse of health care and pinpointing how health professionals can serve patients better from the patient and consumer perspectives.
• Performance measurement and public reporting: using agreed upon standards to measure the quality of care patients receive and making that information available to the public so we can identify areas of improvement and help consumers and patients make informed health care decisions.

• Identify, educate and support consumers and consumer group representatives so they can serve in leadership positions within the Alliances to ensure the consumer voice is heard in all aspects of the AF4Q work.
• Develop a plan to educate consumers and motivate them to take action on the importance of using transparent health information and performance reports to make decision about their own health care at key decision points.
• Help get doctors, hospitals, and health plans the resources to collect information about patients’ race, ethnicity and primary language in order to identify and reduce health care disparities.