Instructions for calculating health system outcomes measures among Medicare beneficiaries receiving care in AHRQ Compendium health systems

At The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, we have created a set of instructions for researchers to recreate a set of selected patient outcomes measured among health systems’ adult Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. The foundation of these measures is health care utilization submitted under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS’) Medicare program. We have rolled these up to the health system level, profiling those systems included in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ’s) Compendium of U.S. Health Systems: https://www.ahrq.gov/chsp/data-resources/compendium.html. Using a combination of CMS Medicare claims data, publicly available health measures (e.g., the Prevention Quality Index [PQI]) and commercially available health system organizational data from IQVIA, these SAS programs build these broad cohorts, assign them to health systems per year and calculate measures (e.g., 30-day hospital readmission). The result is a dataset of health system measures that can be linked back to the annual Compendium files available from AHRQ.