AHRQuality Indicators™

Mission

The Quality Indicators (QIs) are measures of health care quality that use readily available hospital inpatient administrative data. AHRQ develops Quality Indicators to provide health care decisionmakers with tools to assess their data.

Visit the AHRQuality Indicators™ Web site.

Relevance

The QIs are used to highlight potential quality concerns, identify areas that need further study and investigation, and track changes over time. Currently, the AHRQ Quality Indicators are only for use with administrative data in acute care hospitals, and are not available for other types of settings (e.g., long-term care, outpatient, ambulatory, hospice, individual practice, emergency department, or diagnostic centers) or populations (e.g., mental health or substance abuse, emergency preparedness, patient falls, rehabilitation, readmission, surgery, heparin therapy, c. difficile, or nursing quality).

Products

The current AHRQ QI modules represent various aspects of quality: Prevention Quality Indicators, Inpatient Quality Indicators, Patient Safety Indicators, and Pediatric Quality Indicators.

The AHRQ QIs are used in free software distributed by AHRQ. The software can be used to help hospitals identify quality of care events that might need further study. The software programs can be applied to any hospital inpatient administrative data. These data are readily available and relatively inexpensive to use.

Audiences

The QIs are designed for program managers, researchers, and others at the Federal, State, and local levels interested in health care quality measurement.

Settings of Care

Acute care hospitals

Partners

Other agencies may have quality indicators for other settings, so check the National Quality Forum Web site.
The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) also produces tools helpful to crosswalks and software.