The Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), Florida Center for Health Information and Policy Analysis (Florida Center), is the chief health policy and planning entity for Florida. AHCA is responsible for the State's Medicaid program, the licensure of healthcare facilities and the Florida Center is responsible for the Medicaid EHR Incentive Project and the HIE Cooperative Agreement with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to promote the sharing of healthcare data.

AHCA participated in the Adding Clinical Data project to assess the process of combining clinical laboratory data with the Present on Admission (POA) indicator to better predict complications that lead to mortality. The process required mapping laboratory data into the standard Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) before being merged with hospital administrative data containing a POA indicator. Statistical analysis was conducted on the merged dataset to determine which laboratory tests improved the 3M All Patient Refined-Diagnosis Related Grouper (APR-DRG) risk of mortality assignment.

AHCA successfully demonstrated that adding selected clinical laboratory data elements to administrative data can improve the accuracy of risk-adjustment models for predicting hospital mortality rates. AHCA recruited 22 hospitals and developed a Data Sharing Agreement with participants to support the acquisition of clinical data for linkage to existing AHCA data. They worked with 3M Health Information Systems Terminology Consulting Services to map laboratory values to standardized terminology and evaluated how a common risk-adjustment model could be made more accurate with the availability of clinical data.

• Florida Agency for Health Care Administration – The Florida Health Information Network website provides information and resources relating to the Agency's initiatives for Health Information Technology (HIT) and Health Information Exchange (HIE).



• Florida Pilot Project Final Report (PDF file, 705 KB; HTML)



• Other AHRQ-sponsored Pilot and Planning Projects: State specific project information for Minnesota, Virginia and Washington.