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AHRQ guide helps make sense of quality indicators

Quality Improvement Monitor, October 8, 2004

HHS' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has published a free guide to help hospitals use its Inpatient Quality Indicators, or Patient Safety Indicators, to report on hospital quality or make payment decisions.

The Guidance for Using the AHRQ Quality Indicators for Hospital-Level Public Reporting or Payment is available for free download from AHRQ's Quality Indicators Web site. AHRQ's quality indicators allow hospitals to use their own discharge data to better understand and improve the care they provide.

"Improving the quality of America's health care system is a key priority for AHRQ, and the new guide will help those designing public reporting and payment initiatives identify measures that fit their local priorities and needs," says AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, MD. "While the Quality Indicators aren't a one-size-fits-all solution and must be used carefully, they can help local hospitals and their communities use data right now to evaluate performance and ultimately prov ide better care."

The new guide is the first in a series of activities that will help users evaluate which individual indicators or groups of indicators they may want to incorporate into their local quality reporting or payment programs. It's designed to help users customize their use of quality indicators. The guide also suggests ways to best use the Quality Indicators, such as pairing data on deaths and volume indicators or using multiple years of data.

"The Quality Indicators are a boon to purchasers, consumers, and providers looking for insight into the quality of care provided in hospitals," says Christopher Queram, CEO of Employer Health Care Alliance Cooperative in Madison, WI. "In our experience, using the Quality Indicators to compare hospital performance has been a powerful tool to drive health care improvement."

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