The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), as part of its mission to translate research into practice and improve health care quality, develops products to assist State leaders who aim to improve diabetes care in their States. Two of these resources, published in 2004, are:
These documents were based on AHRQ's 2003 National Healthcare Quality Report, which established a baseline for measuring health care quality for the Nation overall and at the State level when data are available. The Resource Guide and its companion Workbook are intended to assist State leaders in considering the need for diabetes care improvements and in knowing how to foster change in their States.
This supplement to the Resource Guide includes data on diabetes care from the 2004 National Healthcare Quality Report, which was released in February 2005.
Select for print version (PDF File, 460 KB). PDF Help.
This supplement presents four quality indicators that describe diabetes care at the State level. These four measures are based on the AHRQ Prevention Quality Indicators, which assess ambulatory care sensitive conditions—hospital admissions that, evidence suggests, could have been avoided, at least in part, through high-quality outpatient care.
These potentially avoidable hospitalizations are outcome indicators for diabetes care in ambulatory settings within the State:
These quality indicators are derived from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) State Inpatient Databases, a series of State-specific databases that capture all discharge records from hospitals in each State. These data are produced by a Federal-State-Industry partnership currently involving 38 States.
The 32 States analyzed in the 2004 quality report (Table 1) comprise 79 percent of community hospital discharges in the United States. The Resource Guide explains how to use the Prevention Quality indicator rates and their standard errors to analyze a State's standing, to create graphics for a State, and to test for differences between a State rate and the best-decile or the national average. Those tests ensure that policymakers will focus on differences that likely reflect health system problems and not on differences that occur because of data weaknesses.
Diabetes Care Quality Improvement: A Resource Guide for State Action provides detailed guidance on how to interpret and evaluate measures and explains the importance of using data and measurement to begin a quality improvement program, to track progress, and to influence continuous improvement.
Key actions to take to make change happen include:
The Resource Guide and Workbook are available online at www.ahrq.gov/qual/diabqualoc.htm. Printed copies may be requested by calling the AHRQ Publications Clearinghouse at (800) 358-9295 or by Email at AHRQPubs@ahrq.hhs.gov.
AHRQ released another diabetes-related resource in January 2005. HCUP Highlight 1, Economic and Health Costs of Diabetes, reveals that about two-thirds of the $2.5 billion in hospitalization costs that could be saved annually with better diabetes care could accrue to Medicare and Medicaid. HCUP Hightlight 1 can be found at www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/highlight1/high1.htm.
Select for a list of HCUP Partners Who Contributed Data to the 2004 National Healthcare Quality Report.
AHRQ Publication Number 04(05)-0072-1
Current as of June 2005
Internet Citation:
Diabetes Care Quality Improvement: A Resource Guide for State Action. Supplement. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. AHRQ Publication No. 04(05)-0072-1, June 2005. http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/diabsupp.htm
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