In 2015, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) created the Comparative Health System Performance (CHSP) Initiative to study how health care systems promote evidence-based practices in delivering care. AHRQ's goal is to understand the factors that affect health systems' use of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) and to identify best practices in disseminating and using PCOR.
To achieve AHRQ's goals, the initiative establishes three Centers of Excellence (CoEs), as well as a Coordinating Center to identify, classify, track, and compare health systems. AHRQ established CoEs at Dartmouth College, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and the RAND Corporation. Mathematica Policy Research serves as the initiative’s Coordinating Center, working collaboratively with AHRQ and the CoEs to facilitate synthesis of findings on comparative health system performance, build a compendium of U.S. health systems, and support dissemination of the CHSP Initiative findings broadly.
A key first step of the initiative is to identify and enumerate health systems. To achieve this objective, AHRQ has developed an initial list of U.S. health systems. This list consolidates information from several data sources, indicating system ownership and provider affiliations with systems and highlighting key system attributes. This consolidated list, referred to as the "list," is intended to be an initial resource for researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders who want to identify and describe systems with the ultimate goal of understanding how health systems can improve the cost and quality of health care. The list forms the basis of the Compendium of U.S. Health Systems, which resides on AHRQ's website and will be updated during the course of the initiative with additional resources to support research on health systems.
This document summarizes the approach taken to create the list. It will be updated each time the Compendium is updated.
- Compendium of U.S. Health Systems, 2018, Technical Documentation (PDF, 1.3 MB).
- Compendium of U.S. Health Systems, 2016, Technical Documentation (updated January 2019) (PDF, 2 MB).
