AHRQ Offers Free Quality Indicators (TM) Toolkit

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) offers a free toolkit to help hospitals understand and make effective use of the agency’s Quality Indicators (QIs) and Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs). In addition to its focus on these indicators, the toolkit is a general guide to using improvement methods.

The Quality Indicators have  been in use for more than a decade and have been incorporated increasingly into public reporting and value-based purchasing programs. As of October 2011, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) includes data from seven PSIs and three QIs on its Hospital Compare website (www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov), which provides information to help guide consumers in choosing a hospital. Combined with reporting and value-based purchasing, the indicators may provide motivation for improvement, but they do not inherently help hospitals improve. Many hospitals may lack the knowledge and skills necessary for quality improvement. AHRQ recognized the need for a set of standardized yet adaptable tools to help hospitals incorporate the quality and patient safety indicators into their ongoing assessment and improvement efforts. To fill this need, AHRQ contracted with the RAND Corporation, which developed the toolkit in collaboration with the University HealthSystem Consortium.

The toolkit is available for free at www.ahrq.gov/qual/qitoolkit/. On that page, there is also a link to an archived webinar that provides an introduction and orientation for the toolkit. The webinar includes comments from developers and researchers at AHRQ and RAND, as well as a clinical quality specialist at Harborview Medical Center in Washington state, who describes her hospital’s experience using the toolkit.