Overview

For the MHA Hospital Performance Project, MHA adopted a subset of indicators developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The AHRQ developed quality indicators in response to a need for nationally defined, multidimensional, accessible quality indicators. The QIs are a family of measures that can be used with hospital inpatient administrative billing data to identify apparent variations in the quality of inpatient or outpatient care. AHRQ uses these measure sets to report on national health care quality issues, including annual reports mandated by Congress on health care quality, the National Healthcare Quality Report and the National Healthcare Disparities Report.

The QIs adopted for use in the MHA Hospital Performance Project measure certain aspects of the quality of patient care that reflect internal hospital activities. The indicators serve as a starting point to assist hospitals in assessing the quality of care provided to patients. The indicators are expected to be used in conjunction with other hospital performance improvement activities and to supplement continuous quality improvement efforts.