Using Healthcare Data to Inform Public Policy

A regional healthcare data sharing arrangement and companion analytical tools provide member facilities with comparative data and reporting on patient safety, quality, and utilization for over 100 hospitals participating in the data-sharing agreement. This regional data resource contains information from approximately 95 percent of the hospitals in the region covering 5.5 million hospital discharges from 1999 and over 2 million outpatient encounters from 2006. Record-linkage allows for examination of data across participating institutions and within communities. Sharing arrangements with local public health and other constituencies is under evaluation. With an estimated 25 percent of the population lacking health insurance healthcare providers are able to analyze care patterns for this population and make policy recommendations. Summarized data is also being provided to a community health assessment website currently under development. These tools allow a quality analyst, a strategic planner, or a researcher to perform multidimensional analysis, create reports, and share them to make better decisions regarding the delivery of healthcare within their organization or community. Use of these tools will be demonstrated. Safety and quality measures include those recommended by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality as well as 30 and 60-day readmission rates. Utilization reports include non-urgent and preventable emergency room encounters based on the New York University algorithm. Our experience with these tools is that professionally educated individuals within the healthcare delivery system with diverse clinical, business and technical skill levels are able to explore large volumes of summarized data with minimal training and support.