The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Announces Four New Programs

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has announced four new programs as part of an ambulatory safety and quality (ASQ) initiative. This posting should not be considered definitive.

• To access the four announcements, follow this link or access each individually below
• Follow this link to access the transcript of the January 4 Technical Assistance call

The four initiatives are:

1. ASQ: Risk Assessment in Ambulatory Care: This announcement has a broad view on ambulatory care that includes the ambulatory care clinician, as well as the patient cared for in ambulatory settings and across high risk transitions in care. Research will focus on assessing the risks associated with ambulatory care that have not yet been fully elucidated. Unlike the rest of the ASQ program, this announcement will not include a primary focus on health information technology.
2. ASQ: Improving Quality through Clinician use of Health IT: This announcement has a primary focus on the ambulatory care clinician. Research will focus on strategies to improve medication management and the delivery of evidence to the point-of-care resulting in improved clinical decision-making and clinical quality for priority conditions. Issues to be addressed include the relationship between Health IT and workflow redesign, systemic barriers to Health IT adoption, care for patients with multiple chronic conditions, enhanced patient-centered models of care delivery, and improved use of effective alert strategies for decision support.
3. ASQ: Patient-Centered Health IT: This announcement has a primary focus on patients and their interaction with the ambulatory health care system. Research will focus on strategies to improve the patient experience of care through the use of health IT. It will include work to improve the delivery of patient-centered health information to ensure patients and clinicians have the information they need to make better health care decisions. Specific topics to be addressed include shared decision-making and patient-clinician communication, personal health records, integration of patient information across transitions in care, and patient self-management of chronic conditions.
4. ASQ: Enabling Patient Safety and Quality Measurement through Health IT: This announcement has a primary focus on integrating patient safety and quality measurement with information technology. Research will focus on strategies to improve transparency for patients in ambulatory care through the development, deployment and export of quality measures from electronic health record systems. Issues to be addressed include measure development across episodes of care, clinical data needs for quality measurement export and reporting, and the reporting of quality data for improvement.