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| The Vermont Health Care Quality Report 2008 |
Ch2: Measuring Quality of Care Ch3: Chronic Illness in Vermont
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Pediatric Quality Indicators (click for printable PDF) The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Pediatric Quality Indicators (PDIs) focus on the quality of children’s healthcare. Like the Patient Safety Indicators, this set of measures includes provider-level and area-level indicators to identify potentially preventable complications. These indicators also include Pediatric heart surgery volume and mortality measures. Pediatric heart surgeries are complicated procedures for which there is evidence to suggest that higher volumes are associated with better outcomes. The PDIs are a tool that takes advantage of hospital administrative discharge data. Examining rates for a single year provides a snapshot view of the hospital performance. Trending these indicators over time, affords the ability to assess whether observed differences are likely the result of normal variation (i.e., rates differ from average in a single year) or if observed differences reflect a pattern (i.e., rates differ from average for longer periods of time). Subsequently this longitudinal perspective may identify hospitals as a model for excellence or areas that may benefit from quality improvement initiatives. The following provider-level indicators are measures of the potentially preventable complications for patients who received their initial care and the complication of care within the same hospitalization. These provider-level indicators include only those cases where a secondary diagnosis code identifies a potentially preventable complication or adverse event.
There are three additional provider-level PDIs that are not being presented in this year’s Quality Report in this year’s Quality Report due to the fact that the results of these measures are not severity adjusted:
There are another five area-level PDIs that are not being presented because they are not severity adjusted. These Indicators track similar events to the provider-level indicators, but use county population data as a denominator rather than hospital discharges as are used in the provider-level measures:
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