Ohio's health care quality performance declined in 2007

The Agency for Health Care Quality and Research (AHRQ) recently released its 2007 State Snapshots Report.  This report creates an overall performance meter that compares data across states on more than 100 health quality measures.  Each states’s dashboard also includes a comparison within a state to its baseline results for that measure.  The report’s performance meter has five categories: very weak; weak; average; strong; and very strong.

The Ohio report also includes 12 dashboards on more specific quality measures.  Each of these dashboards is a composite score from a set of measures.  The underlying data for each of these dashboards is available by clicking on the respective dashboard.

According to the 2007 data, Ohio’s overall performance has declined.  Ohio’s performance meter score fell into the weak category from being at the cusp of average and weak in 2006.  Ohio had very weak ratings for diabetes and home health care.  Of the 8 measures used for diabetes Ohio was worse than average on 6 of those measures and average on 2 of them.  Ohio was not better than average on any of the measures used for that category.  However, Ohio had very strong ratings for heart and hospital measures.  Ohio also showed a strong improvement in the area of respiratory disease measures.  In addition, in some areas Ohio had a mixture of performance.  For instance, for the preventive care meter where Ohio scored weak overall, Ohio was better than average on 4 measures, average on 11 measures, and worse than average on 13 measures.