A p-value represents the probability that a difference or association as large as the one observed or larger was obtained by chance.

The Patient Experience is comprised of research reports and administrative information that reflect quality from the perspective of patients by capturing observations and opinions about what happened during the process of health care delivery. Patient experience encompasses various indicators of patient-centered care, including access (whether patients are obtaining appropriate care in a timely manner), communication skills, customer service, helpfulness of office staff and information resources.

Patient Flow is the movement of patients who seek care in an emergency department through the admission process. This is the process through which patients are granted entry for care at the hospital and seen by a physician.

A Patient Registry is a patient database maintained by a hospital, doctors' practice or health plan that allows providers to identify their patients according to disease, demographic characteristics and other factors. Patient registries can help providers better coordinate care for their patients, monitor treatment and progress and improve overall quality of care.

Patient Satisfaction is a measurement designed to obtain reports or ratings from patients about services received from an organization, hospital, physician or health care provider.

Patient-Centered Care considers patients' cultural traditions, personal preferences and values, family situations and lifestyles. Responsibility for important aspects of self-care and monitoring is put in patients' hands—along with the tools and support they need. Patient-centered care also ensures that transitions between different health care providers and care settings are coordinated and efficient. When care is patient-centered, unneeded and unwanted services can be reduced.

Pay-for-performance is an emerging movement in the health care system, whereby health care providers are awarded for the quality of healthcare services they provide.  Physicians or hospitals that provide a higher quality of care are paid more than those that provide a lower quality of care.  Pay-for-performance is also referred to as value-based purchasing.

Payers comprise the entity that assumes the risk of paying for medical treatments. Examples include uninsured patients, self-insured employers, health plans or HMOs.

Payment Reform seeks to improve current mechanisms for reimbursing providers by including rewards for provider quality in the reimbursement mechanisms.

"Peers" are individuals at the same professional level.  Peer-reviewed medical research has been judged by other doctors or scientists working in the same field.  Nurses and other health care workers sometimes get peer reviews of how they work, teach, or do research.

Performance Measures are sets of established standards against which health care performance is measured. Performance Measures are now widely accepted as a method for guiding informed decision-making as a strong impetus for improvement.

A Personal Health Record (PHR) contains the medical and health-related background documents pertaining to a consumer.

The Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) is authorized through the Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP Extension Act of 2007. It is a financial incentive for health care professionals to improve the quality of care that they provide.

Grouping large numbers of people to spread out their health-insurance risks.  The larger and more diverse the pool of people, the cheaper their premiums can be.

The right to take your health-insurance policy with you if you change or lose your job or if you move.

Preference-Sensitive Care are treatments that involve significant tradeoffs affecting the patient's quality and/or length of life. Decisions about these interventions—whether to have them or not, which ones to have—ought to reflect patients' personal values and preferences, and ought to be made only after patients have enough information to make an informed choice. At times, the scientific evidence on the main outcome—survival—is quite good; in other cases, the evidence is much weaker.

A PPO is a network of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers that have an agreement with a health plan to provide health care at reduced rates to the health plan members.  The health care providers get more patients since most health plan members seek care from a provider within the network, while patients still have the option of seeking care from providers outside the network.  PPOs differ from HMOs in that if a member of an HMO seeks care outside the HMO network, the member usually gets little or no benefit from the health plan.  If a PPO member seeks care outside the network the health plan will still cover much of the costs, although the member may have to pay higher deductibles or co-payments.  A PPO is a type of managed care organization.

Premiums are the cost of health insurance, and can be paid on a monthly basis.  Premiums are either paid for by individuals themselves or by an individual's employer.  Employers may pay some or all of the cost of health insurance for their employees.

Preventive Care is health care services that prevent disease or its consequences. It includes primary prevention to keep people from getting sick (such as immunizations), secondary prevention to detect early disease (such as Pap smears) and tertiary prevention to keep ill people or those at high risk of disease from getting sicker (such as helping someone with lung disease to quit smoking).

Price Transparency is the ability of consumers to know what it will cost to receive a given health care service at a variety of outlets.

Primary Care is basic or general health care traditionally provided by doctors trained in: family practice, pediatrics, internal medicine and occasionally gynecology.

A primary care doctor is a doctor who looks after an individual's general health.  The primary care doctor may refer a patient to specialists.  Specialists have training in specific types of medicine.

In health care, this refers to confidentiality – the ability to promise not to reveal individually identifiable data to others unless approved by the patient or under specified exceptions.  See also Health Information Technology.

Process Improvement comprises techniques and strategies used to make the processes implemented to solve health care problems better. Process improvement can occur in emergency room or hospital settings, as well as in other health-system environments.

A Provider is a professional engaged in the delivery of health services, including physicians, dentists, nurses, podiatrists, optometrists, clinical psychologists, etc. Hospitals and long-term care facilities are also providers. The Medicare program uses the term "provider" more narrowly, to mean participating institutions: hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, etc.

Provider Incentives serve to induce or motivate the regulation of health care. Examples of incentives include monetary rewards for providers who meet specific benchmark standards for their patient care.

A government-run health-insurance plan that could theoretically offer coverage at a price below that of private insurance plans.  Federal leverage could lower administrative costs and reimbursements to doctors and hospitals.

Public Reporting makes information about physician and physician group performance available for consumers to use to compare the performance of local physicians/physician groups. The expectation is that a comparative public report of local physicians' performance in treating people with chronic illnesses will motivate and improve performance.

Deviation of results or inferences from the truth, or processes leading to such deviation, due to a trend in the publication of data that can lead to conclusions that are systematically different from the truth.

Purchasers of health care constitute anyone or any entity buying health care services.  This is a large stakeholder group that includes individuals, the federal government, and employers.  Purchasers are also referred to as payers.