We’d Be In The Dark Without AHRQ

Here at Health Affairs we take the policy relevance of our work very seriously. As the leading health policy journal in the country, with the highest impact factor in our field, we work assiduously to find, edit, and publish the best scholarship that helps policymakers do their job.

When we heard about threats to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) future, we set out to understand how the loss of AHRQ would affect the nation's understanding of critical health policy issues. The results caused us great concern.

While AHRQ contributes in many ways, we focused our analysis on the major data sources that are in the agency's portfolio: the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) surveys, the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) databases, and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). CAHPS is a series of surveys about patients' experiences and the data are routinely used to improve quality and access. HCUP is the largest publicly available all-payer inpatient care database and the nation's best source of hospital data. MEPS collects data on insurance coverage, access to care, health status, and use of services. It is the only nationally representative survey that collects validated data on medical expenditures and it enables unique analyses due to its longitudinal design.

These are some of our findings:

• The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and its predecessor surveys are the number one source of data for Health Affairs
• Two of the top five all-time most-cited Health Affairs papers use an AHRQ data source in their empirical analysis. Those two papers—covering topics as different as obesity and electronic health records—have been downloaded nearly 400,000 times from our website.
• Just since January 2014, Health Affairs has published nearly 40 papers that rely on MEPS or HCUP data as a central component of their analysis.

One striking aspect of the data generated by AHRQ is the breadth of topics it helps us understand. In the past two years, Health Affairs readers have been informed about topics such as hospital admissions and use of emergency departments, medical homes, insurance premiums and networks, and medical costs as a result of analyses of AHRQ's data.

Looking over the years, AHRQ data have helped inform policymakers on an amazing range of topics. Papers in Health Affairs have identified health care disparities and barriers in access to care and analyzed the impact of disparities on affected populations. Other papers have explored insurance affordability and tracked the rising financial burden of chronic conditions. AHRQ data have been instrumental in the creation of a body of research on children's insurance coverage, from projecting enrollment into the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to evaluating its impact.

In our 34 years, Health Affairs has published articles that analyze the effects of every major health policy initiative in the United States, from the Medicare Catastrophic Care Act signed into law by President Reagan, through the Health Security Act proposed by President Clinton, to the creation of Medicare Part D enacted into law by President George W. Bush. We have already published dozens of articles examining the ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and we are sure to publish dozens more.

To produce the high quality scholarship our readers have come to expect—and policymakers need—we rely upon researchers having access to valid, reliable, publicly available data. AHRQ is a key source of that data and the analysis that flows from it. With $3 trillion and the nation's health at stake, we all benefit from what AHRQ provides.

from Health Affairs Blog http://ift.tt/1QwSHsg