Measures of Pediatric Health Care Quality Based on Hospital Administrative Data

This report documents the work undertaken in Phase I of a two-phase process to develop the Pediatric Quality Indicators as part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) contract, "Support for Quality Indicators II" under subcontract with

Battelle Memorial Institute by Stanford University and the University of California at

Davis. This work was initiated in response to a charge to develop indicators of children's health care utilizing inpatient administrative data. These indicators examine both the quality of inpatient care, as well as the quality of outpatient care that can be inferred from inpatient data, such as potentially preventable hospitalizations.

The report contains three main sections:

1. The introduction section launches the actual technical report and provides background

regarding pediatric indicator development and the current effort to develop an indicator

set based on administrative data.

2. The methods section outlines the approach used to gather evidence to identify and

evaluate potential patient safety indicators, including the literature review, empirical

analyses, and clinician panel review, as well as the operationalization of indicators and

evaluation of risk adjustment approaches.

3. The results section is divided into two parts. The first part highlights general themes

and summarizes the overall results. The second part provides detailed results for each

AHRQ QI examined.

Several appendixes provide additional detail regarding methods and results.