Data are used by the Community Health Outcomes Steering Committee’s Hospital Data Analysis Committee and by hospitals and their medical staffs to evaluate comparative outcomes and identify priorities for improvement. Businesses use this information to analyze how their health care dollars are spent and to identify efficient providers.

Aggregate information from this study is used to report trends in hospital care and quality in the community to the public. All release of information must be approved by the participating hospitals prior to release.

This collaborative project is remarkable in several ways:

• it defines some common denominators of quality care that can be tracked among providers
• it puts Greater Cincinnati in the forefront of those cities providing timely, useful data to businesses and the community
• it joins businesses, insurers, hospitals and physicians in a common project that will directly benefit patient care.

History of the Hospital Comparison Study

The MediQual Project
In the spring of 1995, the Community Health Outcomes Steering Committee (formerly the Outcomes Management Task Force), a group of hospital and physician representatives, created a committee, named the Inpatient Committee, to research ways to make hospital data useful in quality improvement efforts. In addition to hospital and physician representatives, the committee included individuals from the local health insurers and the local business community.

Through this collaborative effort, and after extensive research, the committee recommended that the hospitals contract with MediQual Systems, Inc. of Westborough, Massachusetts (now Cardinal Information Corporation, Inc.- MediQual Division) to provide collection and appropriate analyses of hospital data. Twenty hospital sites joined the effort initially and the Health Improvement Collaborative was designated as the liaison between MediQual and the hospital and business communities.

Data collection with MediQual began in January 1996. Quarterly reports were presented to the participants and businesses that purchased it. In 1999, the contract was renewed for two more years and the reports were produced bi-annually. The timeliness of data submission was improved, making reports more useful to the participants. Also, the hospital identifiers were now available to all participants.

The Hospital Comparison Study
Beginning with 2001 data, The Ohio Hospital Association (OHA) replaced MediQual and the project continues using the data hospitals submit to OHA to produce the reports. It was renamed to The Hospital Comparison Study (and the Inpatient Committee was renamed to the Hospital Data Analysis Committee). This change brought eight new hospital participants, for a total of twenty-five participants. 

Producing the study in cooperation with OHA was a decision made because of the following reasons:

• The study would become more cost effective, saving money for the current participants and providing an affordable option for smaller hospitals.
• The study could be expanded to compare with additional data sets, including Children’s Hospital data, rehab data and Ohio state data.
• With servers in the hospitals to handle data submissions, the submission process would be more timely and more efficient for the hospitals.
• Outpatient data would be available.