The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Quality Indicators (QIs) are a set of decisionmaking and research tools for program managers, researchers, and others at the Federal, State, and local levels. Broken into four modules, the tools provide ways to measure quality associated with processes of care that occur in an outpatient or an inpatient setting based on hospital discharge data.

The four modules are:

• Prevention QIs: Identify hospital admissions that evidence suggests could have been avoided, at least in part, through high-quality outpatient care
• Inpatient QIs: Reflect quality of care inside hospitals including inpatient mortality for medical conditions and surgical procedures
• Patient safety indicators: Also reflect quality of care inside hospitals, but focus on potentially avoidable complications and iatrogenic events
• Pediatric QIs: Both reflect quality of care inside hospitals and identify potentially avoidable hospitalizations among children