MEDSTAT Awarded Five-Year Government Contract.

Business Editors, Health & Medical Writers

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--(BW HealthWire)--Oct. 9, 2000

The MEDSTAT Group was awarded a five-year contract with estimated value of $15 million dollars by the federal government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Under this agreement, MEDSTAT will maintain and expand AHRQ's Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) databases. The HCUP databases are a national information resource of patient-level healthcare data with privacy protections in place.

The HCUP databases are created through the partnership efforts of state data organizations, hospital associations, private data organizations, and the federal government. State data organizations contribute patient-level data to the project. HCUP data are used to support health services research, health policy analysis, and quality measurement and improvement. This contract will extend the current HCUP capabilities to include more states and more settings of care, and to develop tools to make better use of the administrative data.

HCUP databases currently provide up to ten years of data from 1988 to 1997. The Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) contains all discharge data from some 1,000 hospitals located in 22 states, approximating a 20-percent stratified sample of U.S. community hospitals. The State Inpatient Databases (SID) cover inpatient care in community hospitals in 22 states, representing more than half of all U.S. hospital discharges. The State Ambulatory Surgery Databases (SASD) contain data from ambulatory care encounters in nine states. The types of data and number of states providing data will increase dramatically over the course of this contract.

"Customers such as AHRQ rely on MEDSTAT for healthcare database development expertise and we're very pleased and excited to continue our work with AHRQ on the HCUP project," said William D. Marder, Ph.D., vice president and general manager at MEDSTAT.

HCUP is managed by AHRQ's Center for Organization and Delivery Studies. AHRQ's mission is to support, conduct, and disseminate research that improves access to care and the outcomes, quality, cost, and utilization of healthcare services. Information from AHRQ research enables better decisions about healthcare. AHRQ was formerly known as the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR).

The MEDSTAT Group (www.medstat.com) is a health information company that provides decision support systems, market intelligence, benchmark databases, and research for managing the purchase, administration, and delivery of health services and benefits. It serves nearly 1,000 organizations including many of the nation's leading employers, providers, pharmaceutical companies, government organizations, and health plans and insurance companies. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Mich., MEDSTAT has a 20-year track record of delivering results for customers through innovative products, superior customer service, and outstanding people.