The Agency for Health Care Administration (Agency), Florida Center for Health Information and Policy Analysis, was awarded a contract for the period of October 2007 to December 2009 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The contract award was for a pilot project to study new ways to approach hospital quality measures. The pilot project funding was provided to assess the added value of combining clinical laboratory data with the administrative data collected by the Agency. During the pilot project the Agency strived to fulfill AHRQ’s project goals to demonstrate and evaluate the process required to: Standardize laboratory data into a common nomenclature based on the Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC); merge the standardized clinical laboratory data with the hospital administrative data collected by the Agency, use the Present on Admission (POA) indicator in the Agency’s administrative dataset to risk-adjust patient records for better predictability of potential complications; and complete a statistical analysis of the merged dataset to test the improvement in predicting potential complications by adding the POA indicator and the clinical laboratory data to the administrative data.

Select each project stage below for more details: