Enhancing Statewide Hospital Discharge Databases: Improving Race, Ethnicity and Clinical Data

For more than two decades, health services researchers have been using statewide hospital discharge datasets to support research on a wide range of topics. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has sponsored a number of projects to help improve the effectiveness of these datasets. This joint HPOE, Health Services Research journal and Equity of Care webinar explores methods to specifically improve the clinical content and race/ethnicity information in these uniform databases.

In August, HSR published a special issue on enhancing statewide hospital discharge databases, focusing on AHRQ-sponsored projects that tested these databases over a three-year period. Analysis from the issue, presented by the authors during this webinar, will extol the value in continued collaboration among researchers, statewide data organizations and hospitals.

During this webinar, participants learned about:

• evolution of hospital discharge data since the 1970s and the emergence of AHRQ's Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP);
• challenges the authors faced in improving clinical content and race/ethnicity data and developing a universal data source;
• one group's project to develop and test audit measures that estimate the accuracy of hospital-level race/ethnicity data reporting; and
• use of laboratory data with statewide discharge data to increase the accuracy of hospital-level reporting.

Presenters:

• Moderator: Kevin Schulman, MD, Professor of Medicine, Business Administration and Global Health, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University
• Roxanne Andrews, PhD, Center for Delivery, Organization and Markets, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Retired)
• David Zingmond, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
• Jill Miyamura, PhD, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Hawaii Health Information Corporation

To view the presentation slides only click here.

To view an archive of the presentaton, click view item below.