State: Florida

Title: Clinically Enhanced Multi-Purpose Administrative Dataset for Comparative Effectiveness Research

Principal Investigator: Hamisu Salihu

Organization: University of South Florida

Project Dates: September 30, 2010, to September 29, 2013

Grant Number: R01 HS19997-01

Comparative effectiveness research is increasingly becoming an essential tool in health care research, and decision-making, and quality improvement process. The newly enacted health care reform establishes a new perspective of health care services with emphasis and incentives for cost-containment and efficient utilization of resources. The paucity of critical comparative cost-effectiveness information to assess intervention options that will enable care providers, consumers, decision-making parties as well as other stakeholders to make informed decisions and choices on available alternatives could hamper the realization of the potentially accruable benefits of the new health care reform.

The state of Florida suffers from a very costly health care system with global annual health care expenditure growth and personal health care and per capita health care expenditures that exceed the national average. The virtual absence of reliable and rigorously validated large, clinically enhanced administrative databases statewide hinders the ability of public health and other researchers to offer evidence-based data that could inform decision-making and improve efficient utilization of health care resources in the state.

For this reason, the project in this grant proposal is capital for the state, because it envisages filling this gap, which is a necessary step if Florida is to succeed in achieving a cost-effective and efficient health care delivery system in the future under the newly enacted national health care reform. The choice of maternal and child health as a focus is timely and well-informed because despite huge spending, Florida is performing below average compared to the rest of the nation in preventing maternal deaths and preterm births.

The aims of this study are as follows:

• To create an expanded clinically enhanced maternal-infant dataset for the state of Florida by augmenting the current statewide hospitalization data files through linkages to other data sources.
• To validate the created dataset in Specific Aim 1 through a rigorous process that will establish confidence in the use of the dataset by the public.
• To demonstrate the utility of the newly created enriched dataset in conducting comparative effectiveness analysis using early-term elective delivery as a case study. The dataset from the project will encompass information from the following data sources: the birth certificate, in-patient hospital discharge data, ambulatory and emergency department data, financial data, and Florida maternal mortality data.