Date and Time
February 2, 2005
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Kathryn M. McDonald - Stanford University

Hospitalizations for children from birth through 17 years old occur 6.3 million times a year in the United States. A national focus on children's healthcare quality has been gaining momentum recently, and as part of this push, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has funded a Stanford-UC Davis-Battelle project to develop pediatric quality indicators using hospital discharge data. The indicators will build upon the publicly available AHRQ Quality Indicators developed by researchers through the Stanford-UCSF Evidence-based Practice Center (based at CHP/PCOR).

Once completed, the pediatric quality indicator module will be disseminated by AHRQ and will be made available to hospitals, health plans, state data organizations, researchers, and other stakeholders interested in quality improvement and health system accountability.

At this Research in Progress seminar, CHP/PCOR executive director Kathryn McDonald, principal investigator for the pediatric quality indicators project, will discuss the development and evaluation of the indicators. The final set of indicators is expected to include avoidable hospitalization rates as a signal of potential deficiencies in access to good outpatient care in a given area; potentially preventable complication rates to support efforts to improve patient safety; and inpatient mortality rates for some procedures.