Health and Business Administration: HBA Tests & Measurements

Profiles of successful and attempted innovations describe the innovative activity, its impact, how the innovator developed and implemented it, and other useful information for deciding whether to adopt the innovation; and practical tools for assessing, measuring, promoting, and improving the quality of health care. The entire Health Care Innovations Exchange collection (Innovation Profiles and QualityTools) is freely available for download.

The Atlas of Integrated Behavioral Health Care Quality Measures aims to support the field of integrated behavioral health care measurement by: presenting a framework for understanding measurement of integrated care; providing a list of existing measures relevant to integrated behavioral health care; and organizing the measures by the framework and by user goals to facilitate selection of measures.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) HRSA Quality Toolkit provides a suite of educational tools and resources equipped with proven strategies and techniques to effectively support an organization's new or existing quality improvement (QI) program. The toolkit was compiled from several HRSA organizations, where members have proven their usefulness in current QI health care delivery initiatives. The tools and resources were used for implementing data collection and performance measurement techniques, and the organizations that integrated their use into QI programs effectively improved their deliveries of care. These resources are adaptable and may be used to facilitate the implementation of a new QI program or fine tune an existing one.

The National Library of Medicine's Health Services Research Resources (HSRR) is a searchable database of information about research datasets, instruments/indices, and software. Users may review data and compare characteristics across datasets. Examples of HSRR data sources include: clinical records, discharge summaries, claims records, epidemiological surveys, surveys, and registries.

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) initiative provides a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perspectives on hospital care. HCAHPS is a core set of questions that can be combined with a broader, customized set of hospital-specific items. HCAHPS survey items complement the data hospitals currently collect to support improvements in internal customer services and quality related activities.

The Medical Outcomes Trust is a not for profit organization dedicated to improving health and health care by promoting the science of outcomes measurement. The organization has five objectives: assure the development of high-quality instruments to measure health outcomes; assure the widespread availability of a comprehensive library of instruments to measure health outcomes; achieve standardization of health outcomes measuring instruments; advance applications technology for ease of use and interpretation, and for greater practical value in everyday medical practice; and integrate outcomes measurement with appropriateness, practical guidelines, and utility information (patient preferences) in systems of quality improvement.

This publication is the product of a national working group that examined key dimensions of religiousness/spirituality as they relate to physical and mental health outcomes. Its 12 papers include brief literature reviews, recommended instruments, and bibliographies for each of the 12 identified domains. Also included is the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality, an instrument substantially based on select questions from each domain. The report contains psychometric and population distribution data, including the questions and domains, percentage distributions, and psychometric data from the measure that was included in the 1997-1998 General Social Survey (GSS). This project and its working group were supported by the Fetzer Institute in collaboration with The National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) produces the National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR) and the National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR). These reports measure trends in effectiveness of care, patient safety, timeliness of care, patient-centeredness, and efficiency of care. The reports present, in chart form, the latest available findings on quality of and access to health care.

The National Quality Measures Clearinghouse (NQMC), sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, is a public repository for evidence-based healthcare quality measures and measure sets.

The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND Health has produced many practical surveys and tools. Many are available on their Surveys and Tools site, organized by topic.

The Stanford Patient Education Research Center has about 20 years of experience developing, adapting, and testing self-administered scales in English and Spanish for research subjects with chronic diseases. These scales are available at no cost, thanks to funding from the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR).

To rank the best adult and children’s hospitals, U.S. News analyzes data for nearly 5,000 centers.

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is a classification of health and health-related domains. ICF is the World Health Organization (WHO) framework for measuring health and disability at both individual and population levels. ICF was officially endorsed by all 191 WHO Member States as the international standard to describe and measure health and disability.

The American Hospital Association conducts an annual survey of hospitals in the United States. Fast Facts provides a sample of what is available in AHA Hospital Statistics, 2014 edition. The definitive source for aggregate hospital data and trend analysis, AHA Hospital Statistics includes current and historical data on utilization, personnel, revenue, expenses, managed care contracts, community health indicators, physician models, and much more.

Hospital Compare has information about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals and can be used to find hospitals and compare the quality of their care.

The Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) is a national private/public partnership committed to adopting and disseminating to the public standardized, meaningful, relevant, and easily understood information about hospitals' performance on an ever-increasing number of clinical quality and patient experience measures.