Why were the AHRQ QIs developed?
Health care decision makers need user-friendly data and tools that will help them: • Assess the effects of health care program and policy choices. • Guide future health care policy making. • Accurately measure outcomes, community access to care, utilization, and costs. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has developed an array of health care decision making and research tools that can be used by program managers, researchers, and others at the Federal, State and local levels. One of these tools is the AHRQ Quality Indicators (QIs), which use hospital administrative data to highlight potential quality concerns, identify areas that need further study and investigation, and track changes over time. They represent a refinement of the Quality Indicators developed in the early 1990s as part of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). The original HCUP quality indicators were expanded to form the AHRQ QIs by: • Identifying quality indicators reported in the litera
