The National Committee for Quality Assurance will release Quality Compass 2005 this summer. The online tool is described as indispensable for selecting a health plan, conducting competitor analysis, quality improvement, benchmarking and health care research. It will be released to the public on July 28.

Updates for Quality Compass 2005 include trended data with up to three additional years of data; Web access, which will eliminate the need to download or install applications: an enhanced user interface to improve ease of use; a data exporter that exports data directly to Excel; and custom reports, to allow users to create and save custom reports.

The tool will allow users to access plan-specific, comparative and descriptive information on the performance of more than 300 commercial and point-of-service products from across the United States, as well as national and regional performance benchmarks. Plan-specific and national averages for Medicaid plans are also available.

There will be several editions of Quality Compass 2005 available. For more information, visit www.ncqa.org.

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