AHRQ Awards Ambulatory Safety and Quality Grants

In September 2007, The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) awarded grants to more than forty ambulatory health care organizations to improve the safety and quality of health care delivered to patients in the United States. Safe, high quality ambulatory care requires complex information management and coordination across multiple settings, especially for patients with chronic illnesses. The opportunity to turn the potential of health information technology (IT) towards improving safety and quality in the ambulatory care setting, especially within care transitions, forms the cornerstone of the Ambulatory Safety and Quality (ASQ) Program.

As part of its mission to support AHRQ-funded projects, the AHRQ National Resource Center for Health IT is working to provided technical assistance to these new grant projects and share their outcomes with the Nation. Currently, the National Resource Center offers those interested a searchable index of the ASQ grants enabling the public to see the diverse group of grants utilizing information technologies to improve health care.

With these new grants, AHRQ has now invested in more than 150 projects, spanning nearly every State, at a total of $210 million. All projects funded by the Agency, and any known outcomes, are available review by the public via the National Resource Center Web site.

The ASQ program contains an emphasis on the role of health IT in three categories:

• Enabling Quality Measurement through health IT (EQM)
• Improving Quality through Clinician Use of Health IT (IQHIT)
• Enabling Patient-Centered Care through Health IT (PCC)

Here are some examples of projects part of the ASQ program:

• Electronic Prescribing and Decision Support to Improve Rural Primary Care Quality (Sioux Falls, SD)
• Optimizing Medication History Value in Clinical Encounters with Elderly Patients (Providence, RI)
• Patient-Centered Online Disease Management Using a Personal Health Record System (Palo Alto, CA)
• Surveillance for Adverse Drug Events in Ambulatory Pediatrics (St. Louis, MO)
• Using a Telemedicine System to Promote Patient Care Among Underserved Individuals (Philadelphia, PA)
• Using Electronic Records to Detect and Learn from Ambulatory Diagnostic Errors (Houston, TX)

To view all the ASQ grant projects, click here (PDF, 430 KB).