Quality Indicators Essay

320 Words2 Pages
The Quality Indicators (QIs) developed and maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) are one response to the need for multidimensional, accessible quality measures that can be used to gage performance in health care. The QIs are evidence based and can be used to identify variations in the quality of care provided on both an inpatient and outpatient basis. These measures are currently organized into four modules: the Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs), the Inpatient Quality Indicators (IQIs), the Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs), and the Pediatric Quality Indicators (PDIs). Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs)- The AHRQ PQIs are one set of quality measures that can be used to identify potential problems and ascertain disparities across regions, communities, and providers. They mainly focuses on preventive care services—outpatient services that assist individuals with either staying healthy or managing chronic illness. The Inpatient Quality Indicators (IQIs)- The AHRQ IQIs provide information about the quality of medical care delivered in a hospital. This measure set represents the state of the art in measuring the quality of hospital care using inpatient administrative data. The IQIs include measures in the areas of inpatient mortality; utilization of procedures for which there are questions of overuse, underuse, or misuse; and volume of procedures for which there is evidence that a higher volume is associated with lower mortality. The Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs)- The PSIs are a set of quality measures that use hospital inpatient discharge data to provide a perspective on patient safety. Specifically, the PSIs identify problems that patients experience through contact with the health care system and that are likely amenable to prevention by implementing system level changes. The problems identified are referred to as complications
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