New Web Application Allows Healthcare Decision Makers to Monitor the Performance of Hospitals through Inpatient Quality Indicators

摘要

Inpatient quality indicators are measures which provide relevant information on the level of quality of care provided by hospitals and healthcare services. This article will present a new web application whose functionalities are focused on healthcare management. This web application allows healthcare decision makers to monitor the performance of public and private hospitals in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, through the analysis and management of a subset of inpatient quality indicators (IQIs), extracted from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). There were selected twenty-two AHRQ's inpatient quality indicators that are commonly used to evaluate the mortality associated with certain conditions and procedures, as well as the quantity and quality of certain medical procedures. The software is composed by two components: one is responsible for calculating the indicators using admission data extracted from an operational database; the other one is meant for the study and analysis of time series of the indicators, which allows the monitoring of its values over the years. At the end of the development process, this software was made available to the users after having been evaluated through usability and functionality tests. The main users of this software are health service administrators and academic personnel.