The Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), Florida Center for Health Information and Policy Analysis, was awarded a contract from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) that runs through September 2009 for a pilot project to study new ways to approach hospital quality measures. The pilot project funding is provided to add clinical laboratory data to the hospital administrative data already collected by the Agency under statutory authority. By adding clinical data to administrative data, AHRQ hopes to develop better predictors for hospital quality indicators. Florida is one of only three states that have received these grants.
Research has found that through the addition of present on admission to diagnoses it was possible to create risk adjustment models that have discriminatory power for rating hospital performance on selected AHRQ Inpatient Quality Indicators and Patient Safety Indicators.
The purpose of the pilot project is to demonstrate and evaluate the process required to 1) standardize laboratory data into a common nomenclature; 2) merge clinical data with hospital administrative data; 3) complete a statistical analysis of the merged dataset; 4) assess the added value of using clinical data to evaluate the quality of patient care within hospitals; 5) and describe all findings in a Final Report.
The 3M Health Information Systems, Inc (3M HIS) will work with the pilot hospitals to map their laboratory values to standardized Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) terminology and to evaluate the extent to which the 3M risk-adjustment model can be used in public hospital performance comparisons and can be made more accurate with the availability of the clinical data.
Adding Clinical Data to Statewide Clinical Data Pilot Project Analysis & Results Report (.pdf 279 KB)