The Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance - a coalition of the state's four Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurers as well as its hospitals, doctors and government health agencies - developed the site so that patients can learn about hospital quality from a range of sources in four key areas:

Heart attacks.

Heart failure.

Pneumonia.

Hospital-associated infections.

The information, from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, and the Joint Commission, a group that accredits hospitals, will be searchable.

"Our goal has been to work together on a common way of understanding and sharing the quality measures data that providers are already required to report," Carolyn F. Scanlan, president of the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, said in a statement.

The initial measures for four clinical areas are available at the groups web site, www.phcqa.org.

"We will add more clinical topics and quality measures as they are developed, and will continue to modify the site to make it as useful to consumers as possible," said Gerald Miller, chairman of the group and the former head of the Crozer-Keystone Health System in Delaware County.

Much of the site's information is has been available in some form on the Web. Bringing it together into one, user-friendly place was the result of the unique partnership of insurers, health-care providers, and government regulators, said I. Steven Udvarhelyi, chief medical officer of Independence Blue Cross.

"What differentiates PHCQA is the collaborative nature of its process," Udvarhelyi said.