New AHRQ tool to help hospitals better display quality data

• 7/16/2010
• Author: Audrie Bretl Roelf
• Category: Benchmark Blog
• 7275 Views
• 0 Comments
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The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) has released a new tool for hospital administrative or claims data. MONAHRQ (My Own Network, Powered by AHRQ) is a free software program built to allow organizations to analyze data and/or create their own Web sites.

The AHRQ released MONAHRQ in early June in hopes that organizations, including individual hospitals, hospital associations, and regional health initiatives, would take advantage of the ability to analyze and display data at no cost.

A Web site created using MONAHRQ will provide information in the following four areas:
• Quality of care for specific hospitals—provides information about patient safety, patient deaths in the hospital
   and other quality-related
• Provision of services by hospital for health conditions and procedures—provides information about the number
   of patient discharges, charges, costs and length of hospitalizations for specific hospitals
• Potentially avoidable hospitalizations—creates maps of county-by-county rates for potentially avoidable
   hospitalizations
• Rates of health conditions and procedures—provides information about the prevalence of diseases or
   medical procedures through maps of county-by-county rates for selected conditions and procedures

While they both provide information to the public on hospital quality, the Web sites generated by MONAHRQ users differ from The Department of Health and Human Service’s Hospital Compare Web site because of the information reported. For example, MONAHRQ users provide information on elements of care that are not offered by Hospital Compare, including outcome measures of quality by individual hospital, such as patient safety events and deaths; data on which high-volume procedures are associated with better outcomes; and preventable hospitalizations by county on conditions for which good outpatient care could avert the need for a hospital stay.

MONAHRQ also is a completely different way of generating the information. Using the MONAHRQ software, users generate a custom Web site on hospital quality using a step-by-step approach to analyzing the data and generate a Web site that they can then host.

Look for an article in a future issue of Benchmark on this new initiative.

Has your organization had the opportunity to check out MONAHRQ? Would you, or do you, find it to be a useful tool? What are your thoughts on using the data to generate a custom Web site?