Value, 2009

State of Kansas

May 2009

As a result of attending an AHRQ-sponsored workshop, Kansas officials decided to expand the State's participation as an Healthcare Cost & Utilization Project (HCUP) partner and begin sharing the State's data publicly through HCUPnet (http://hcupnet.ahrq.gov).

The AHRQ Knowledge Transfer Program's Quality Diagnostic Tools for States sponsored the State Healthcare Quality Improvement Workshop in December 2007. This workshop featured several AHRQ products and tools to diagnose quality issues and improve quality of care.

The workshop created increased interest in the hospital administrative data itself, as well as the information it could provide. Several Kansas Hospital Association members attended the workshop, including Loretta Massey, RN, Director of Clinical Improvement for Stormont-Vail Healthcare. After returning to Kansas, Massey encouraged Sally Perkins, Data Services Manager for the Kansas Hospital Association, to allow the addition of Kansas data to HCUPnet.

Perkins had presented the data to hospital association members in the past, encouraging the sharing of the data through HCUPnet, but there was insufficient interest among the membership to share the data fully. The Kansas Hospital Association had already been collecting all of the necessary State data and was an HCUP partner prior to the workshop; however, it was not a fully participating partner.

Massey states, "As a result of the workshop, we believed the first thing to address was to get all the Kansas data on HCUPnet."

Impact Case Study Identifier: KT-CDOM-09
AHRQ Product(s): Quality Diagnostic Tools for States, HCUPnet
Topic(s): Policy, Quality
Scope: Kansas

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