The National Association of Health Data Organizations (NAHDO) is proposing a three-year conference and educational project to improve the utility and comparability of statewide hospital and claims-based data sets for health services research, policy decisions, transparency, and other broad uses. This conference grant proposal is being submitted at a time when many states are seeking to expand their data portfolios in response to health care and payment reforms and increased policy interest in price and quality transparency information, yet state data agencies vary in their abilities to respond to these demands. This proposed project aims are to promote a uniform approach across core state data agency practices and to strengthen state- to-state applied learning partnerships, exploring the potential for future shared analytic projects. The target audience for this project are the front-line data system practitioners in states responsible for managing large-scale multi-purpose data systems. Leveraging NAHDO?s three decades of convening national conferences and workshops and providing technical support to state data reporting programs, this project will plan and implement specialty workshops and webinars with each year addressing a core practice domain: 1) Data quality assurance and improvement : 2) Data enhancement and acquisition; and 3) Best practices in analytics and actionable reporting. The first two years of this project will focus on priority technical issues that state data agencies typically face and have been demonstrated to improve data quality and completeness. The third year of the project will build on the first two years? developments and will concentrate activities on advancing analytics by featuring innovative use cases and sharing of underlying methods that could be replicated across states including common claims based measures. We would also explore the interest in and feasibility of establishing a multi-state analytic project in the future in which states would work collaboratively to apply common methods and results. Proceedings of each year?s workshops and webinars will be summarized in white papers and educational resources will be compiled in a dedicated project portal and widely disseminated.
Statewide Hospital Discharge Databases (HDDBs) and All-Payer Claims Databases (APCDs) capture system-wide data designed for broad public uses, such as population health and system performance and, as such, play a unique role in the nation?s data ecosystem. However, agencies maintaining these data vary in their capabilities to respond to growing demands to produce information for price and quality transparency and public health surveillance. NAHDO proposes a three-year series of focused educational activities to address priority issues affecting these reporting initiatives with the intent to promote uniformity and comparability of data and information across states and improve the utility of these data.
