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AHRQ — Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs)
Area-level
for California
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Quality Indicators (QIs) are a set of measures that provide a perspective on hospital quality of care using patient data routinely reported to OSHPD.
Prevention Quality Indicators by County
- 2007 Prevention Quality Indicators: pdf | xls
- 2006 Prevention Quality Indicators: pdf | xls
- 2005 Prevention Quality Indicators: pdf | xls
The Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs) are a set of measures that can be used with hospital inpatient discharge data to identify quality of care for "ambulatory care sensitive conditions" in adult populations. These are conditions for which good outpatient care can potentially prevent the need for hospitalization or for which early intervention can prevent complications or more severe disease.1
The Prevention Quality Indicators represent hospital admission rates for the following 14 ambulatory care sensitive conditions:
- Diabetes Short-term Complications
- Perforated Appendix
- Diabetes Long-term Complications
- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
- Hypertension
- Congestive Heart Failure (CHF)
- Low Birth Weight
- Dehydration
- Bacterial Pneumonia
- Urinary Tract Infections
- Angina without Procedure
- Uncontrolled Diabetes
- Adult Asthma
- Lower-extremity Amputations among Patients with Diabetes
With high-quality, community-based primary care, hospitalization for these illnesses often can be avoided.
Although other factors outside the direct control of the health care system, such as poor environmental conditions or lack of patient adherence to treatment recommendations, can result in hospitalization, the PQIs provide a good starting point for assessing quality of health services in the community. Because the PQIs are calculated using readily available hospital administrative data, they are an easy-to-use and inexpensive screening tool. They can be used to provide a window into the community—to identify unmet community healthcare needs, to monitor how well complications from a number of common conditions are being avoided in the outpatient setting, and to compare performance of local healthcare systems across communities.
These indicators were created using patient data submitted electronically by California-licensed hospitals. The data were not validated by OSHPD beyond the routine error-checking that occurs during the data submission process. Additional information about the methods for calculating these indicators, along with detailed technical explanations, is provided by AHRQ at their Web site. AHRQ also provides valuable guidance regarding the validity of these indicators and important limitations on their use as quality measures.
1 Text taken from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Web site.