During the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., which ended Wednesday, legislators, policy makers and industry leaders called for "greater disclosure of performance data by health care providers on a wide array of care measures," Wall Street Journal reporter Laura Landro writes in her "Informed Patient" column. Humphrey Taylor, chair of Harris Interactive's Harris Poll, said at the conference, "Consumers are miserably armed right now to make judgments on quality." Recently created Web sites, including QualityTools and CompareYourCare, allow consumers to take a more active part in evaluating health care quality, and more employee health plans are providing access to quality ratings and health care "report cards" on hospitals and physicians within health plan networks, Landro writes. However, such report cards' "usefulness is a matter of debate," she says. According to Landro, critics of report cards say that one problem is that they often lack "crucial quality measures such as complication rates and medical errors," data that is held from public. Landro notes that the new Medicare legislation includes a voluntary hospital quality reporting system, which will give the public data on 10 measures of care for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia. A group of companies, health advocacy groups and institutions also is sponsoring the Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project, which aims to give Americans the possibility to choose physicians, hospitals and treatments based on publicly reported measures such as consumer experience, efficiency and quality by 2007, Landro writes (Landro, Wall Street Journal, 1/29).