# Improving the Utility and Comparability of Health Care Data for Health Services Research, Policy Decisions and Transparency Reports

> **NIH AHRQ R13** · NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HEALTH DATA ORGS · 2020 · $48,575

## Abstract

The National Association of Health Data Organizations (NAHDO) is proposing a three-year
conference and educational project to improve the utility and comparability of statewide
hospital and claims-based data sets for health services research, policy decisions, transparency,
and other broad uses. This conference grant proposal is being submitted at a time when many
states are seeking to expand their data portfolios in response to health care and payment
reforms and increased policy interest in price and quality transparency information, yet state
data agencies vary in their abilities to respond to these demands. This proposed project aims are
to promote a uniform approach across core state data agency practices and to strengthen state-
to-state applied learning partnerships, exploring the potential for future shared analytic
projects. The target audience for this project are the front-line data system practitioners in states
responsible for managing large-scale multi-purpose data systems. Leveraging NAHDO’s three
decades of convening national conferences and workshops and providing technical support to
state data reporting programs, this project will plan and implement specialty workshops and
webinars with each year addressing a core practice domain: 1) Data quality assurance and
improvement : 2) Data enhancement and acquisition; and 3) Best practices in analytics and
actionable reporting. The first two years of this project will focus on priority technical issues
that state data agencies typically face and have been demonstrated to improve data quality and
completeness. The third year of the project will build on the first two years’ developments and
will concentrate activities on advancing analytics by featuring innovative use cases and sharing
of underlying methods that could be replicated across states including common claims based
measures. We would also explore the interest in and feasibility of establishing a multi-state
analytic project in the future in which states would work collaboratively to apply common
methods and results. Proceedings of each year’s workshops and webinars will be summarized
in white papers and educational resources will be compiled in a dedicated project portal and
widely disseminated.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10015292
- **Project number:** 5R13HS026663-03
- **Recipient organization:** NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HEALTH DATA ORGS
- **Principal Investigator:** Norman Thurston
- **Activity code:** R13 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** AHRQ
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $48,575
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-30 → 2021-09-29

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10015292

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10015292, Improving the Utility and Comparability of Health Care Data for Health Services Research, Policy Decisions and Transparency Reports (5R13HS026663-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-27 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10015292. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*