This toolkit provides practical tools and guidance to those interested in broadening and supplementing their existing administrative health data by adding clinical data elements. The toolkit is designed for statewide data organizations that collect hospital administrative data, such as those participating in AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. However, the toolkit may also be useful for a variety of others with a role in enhancing administrative databases with clinical data elements, such as hospital leadership, quality improvement personnel, clinicians, and hospital IT departments.

The toolkit is based on the materials developed by, and the experiences of, five AHRQ Enhanced State Data grantees from Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York who collaborated with state and healthcare provider organizations to enhance existing hospital claims databases with clinical data, and use them to demonstrate how the enhancements improved their value in comparative effectiveness research. Enhancements included linking hospital claims data to hospital numerical laboratory data, to hospital ambulatory and emergency room claims data, to birth and death certificate data, to inpatient pharmacy order data, and to pre-admission emergency medical services data.

• The Case for Improving Clinical Data
  
• Project Initiation and Planning
  
• Training
  
• Data Collection, Linkage, and Management
  
• About the Grants (includes tools developed by each grantee)