Subscribe to Updates
AHRQ — Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs)
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.
Patient Safety Indicators by County
- 2007 Patient Safety Indicators: pdf | xls
- 2006 Patient Safety Indicators: pdf | xls
- 2005 Patient Safety Indicators: pdf | xls
The PSIs are a set of measures that screen for adverse events that patients experience as a result of exposure to the healthcare system. The area-level indicators capture all cases of the potentially preventable complication that occur in a given area (e.g., county) either during hospitalization or resulting in subsequent hospitalization. Area-level indicators are specific to include principal diagnosis, as well as secondary diagnoses, for the complications of care. This specification adds cases where a patient’s risk of the complication occurred in a separate hospitalization.1
The PSIs provide a perspective on patient safety events using hospital administrative data, which are readily available and relatively inexpensive to use, and include the following 4 county-level indicators:
- Iatrogenic Pneumothorax, Secondary Diagnosis Field
- Selected Infections due to Medical Care, Secondary Diagnosis Field
- Postoperative Wound Dehiscence
- Postoperative Hemorrhage or Hematoma
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.