Purpose.

This AHRQ Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), supported by funds provided to AHRQ under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act or ARRA), Public Law 111-5, invites infrastructure development research grant (R01) applications from organizations seeking to either

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1) enhance the clinical content of statewide, all-payer, hospital-based encounter-level data to support comparative effectiveness research, or 2) improve the reliability and validity of information in hospital-based encounter-level data related to race and ethnicity.

Enhancing clinical content.

This project will make resources available to organizations that collect statewide all-payer, hospital-based encounter-level data (inpatient, emergency department, and ambulatory surgery) and that have the capacity to significantly broaden and supplement their existing population-based data for the purpose of both producing the evidence base for comparative effectiveness and evaluating efforts to implement comparative effectiveness.

Data organizations will link their existing core data to a choice of additional data base enhancements, including but not limited to:
hospital-based electronic pharmacy data, electronic clinical data, electronic pre-hospital emergency care data, clinical registries, and vital record birth and death certificates.

Because the cost of augmenting an existing, encounter-level, statewide, administrative hospital data base varies considerably depending on the specific clinical data elements to be added, the application should inventory and discuss the reasons for selecting the specific clinical data elements that are to be added to the statewide, encounter-level, hospital-based administrative data set.