Are Patient Safety Indicators related to widely used measures of hospital quality?
The availability of multiple publicly reported measures of hospital quality has led to controversy, as prior research has shown that hospitals' "quality" may vary widely depending on the measurement method. The AHRQ Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) use administrative data to screen for possible patient safety problems and have been used in high-profile publications to directly compare hospitals' performance. This study assessed the relationship between hospitals' performance on PSIs and other commonly used quality measures and found poor concordance overall. Prior research has also questioned the validity of using PSIs to compare hospital performance, and in fact, the PSIs were not originally intended for such use.