The Minnesota Hospital Association (MHA) is a trade association representing Minnesota’s hospitals and health systems. They strive to be influential, trusted, and respected leaders in healthcare policy and advocacy, and to be a valued resource for information and knowledge for the State.

MHA participated in the Adding Clinical Data project to explore the feasibility of creating cost-effective enhanced hospital administrative-clinical databases to support quality improvement initiatives and improve risk-adjusted hospital performance measurement. In addition, MHA sought to engage stakeholders and peer-group organizations to identify and share best practices for data capture, particularly for organizations with different information capabilities, and to support efforts to utilize these enhanced databases. Thus, MHA worked to set the stage for the enrichment of enhanced databases as improved health information technology becomes more widely available.

MHA found that a critical factor to success was hosting a kick-off event and subsequent meetings and conference calls with participating hospitals and consultants. Thirteen Minnesota hospitals participated in the pilot, and MHA and their contractors worked to facilitate mapping of hospital laboratory values to a standardized terminology and create a common format that could be extracted from each hospital’s internal clinical systems. Many were not using the technology, but were able to map their data using the standard. Secure portals were set up to submit data, and the data were checked for integrity. Data streams were linked by the contractor after transmission to MHA. The regular events kept participants engaged and informed.

• http://www.mnhospitals.org/data-reporting/mandatory-reporting/ahrq-lab-pharmacy-project - MHA website containing Pilot Project materials.



• Minnesota Pilot Project Final Report (PDF file, 175 KB; HTML)



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