Health care database to come from Thomson renewal

Thomson Medstat of Ann Arbor, Mich., has been awarded a contract renewal from the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research to build and support the next version of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. The project is a family of databases and related software containing the largest U.S. collection of longitudinal hospital care data, with patient encounter information from 1988.

The contract renewal represents the largest and most complex version of the databases to date. Thomson Medstat also will provide data acquisition and management, development of specialized databases and reports and outreach to expand the base of users.

HCUP, developed through a partnership of the federal government, states and industry, allows for research on a range of health policy issues, including the cost and quality of health services, access to health care, medical-practice patterns and medical-treatment outcomes at the national, state and local levels.

The value of the three-year contract from the agency of the Health and Human Services Department is $14.9 million.

Under this contract, Thomson Medstat also supports development of the National Healthcare Quality Report and the National Healthcare Disparities Report for Congress. These reports, last issued in December 2005, include a broad set of performance measures that document baselines and trends which shed light on the quality of health care and differences among vulnerable populations.

Mary Mosquera is a staff writer for Washington Technology's affiliate publication, Government Computer News.