​​​​ The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, leads the federal government's efforts to improve safety and quality within America's health care system. AHRQ collects data from states, creates tools and publishes reports in their effort to help states and communities improve their health knowledge, outcomes and lead to more informed policy making.  One of these tools allows states to use inpatient claims data to calculate quality indicators. Kentucky currently uses this tool to calculate prevention quality indications (PQIs) (and maps) and inpatient quality indicators (IQI).​

AHRQ Quality Indicators (QIs) are measures of health care quality that use hospital inpatient administrative data and can be used to highlight potential quality concerns in communities or facility, identify areas that need further study and investigation and track changes over time. AHRQ has provided states with a software program that allows them to use their own Inpatient Hospitalization data to calculate state level quality indicators and compare them to National Benchmarks.

Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs) look at hospitalizations that might have been prevented if the patient was able to get better care in their community. These QIs allow counties to compare themselves to the national average, other counties and to themselves over time.