AHRQ Launches Outcomes Database for U.S. Pediatric Inpatient Care
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality on Thursday announced the launch of the nation's first database of pediatric inpatient care, designed to allow researchers to easily access and compare outcomes and hospital charges for children's treatment. The Kids Inpatient Database (KID) includes information from more than 1.9 million inpatient stays at more than 2,500 hospitals nationwide and covers patients from birth to age 18. According to AHRQ, the database will allow researchers to examine national and regional trends for children's health care across a variety of procedures and common childhood conditions. In addition, the size of the database will allow researchers to examine data for rare conditions and seldom performed procedures -- areas previously lacking substantial amounts of data. Lisa Simpson, AHRQ deputy director, called KID a "major step forward" in examining children's health care. KID is part of AHRQ's Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, a group of databases, Web-based products and software aimed at creating a uniform, multi-state data system to support health care research (AHRQ release, 7/12).
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