AHRQ ARRA Grant: Enhanced State Hospital Data for Comparative Effectiveness & Race-Ethnicity Analysis

Enhancing clinical content. This project will make resources available to organizations that collect statewide all-payer, hospital-based encounter-level data (inpatient, emergency department, and ambulatory surgery) and that have the capacity to significantly broaden and supplement their existing population-based data for the purpose of both producing the evidence base for comparative effectiveness and evaluating efforts to implement comparative effectiveness. Data organizations will link their existing core data to a choice of additional data base enhancements, including but not limited to: hospital-based electronic pharmacy data, electronic clinical data, electronic pre-hospital emergency care data, clinical registries, and vital record birth and death certificates. Because the cost of augmenting an existing, encounter-level, statewide, administrative hospital data base varies considerably depending on the specific clinical data elements to be added, the application should inventory and discuss the reasons for selecting the specific clinical data elements that are to be added to the statewide, encounter-level, hospital-based administrative data set.