Latest Brief's:

September 24, 2002: The TCGEC Executive Committee met to finalize plans for the third -year grant that began July 1, 2002 and for the 23rd PDI to be held in early spring 2003 on Galveston Island. Click here to read minutes. The next meeting is scheduled at the PDI, with another following receipt of evaluation data. Contact Dr. Judy Drew at UTMB about attending this major statewide meeting. 

May 1, 2001

We have finished scheduling all of the EPOM meetings with our evaluation consultant, Carole Ashton, MD, MPH. Dr. Ashton said that she was especially impressed with the CAP projects.  Here are some guidelines to prepare for your evaluation schemas as we begin the second year of the new grant:

1. Write down a conceptual model of what you want to achieve.

2. Operationally define what "X" is (the independent variable) and develop answers to the question: "What do we need to do to get to "Y," the dependent or outcome variable.

3. Then determine which measures we can reasonably use that will produce "warrantable" conclusions

BCM
UNT
UTMB Galveston
TSU
UH-GSSW
TWU
TAMU
Pan-AM
U of H

Ashton's Articles

1. "The association between the quality of inpatient care and early readmission: a meta-analysis of the evidence."
   Ashton CM, Del Junco DJ, Souchek J, Wray NP, Mansyur CL
2. "A conceptual framework for the study of early readmission as an indicator of quality of care."
   Ashton CM, Wray NP
3. The association between the quality of inpatient care and earlyreadmission.
   Ashton CM, Kuykendall DH, Johnson ML, Wray NP, Wu L
4. Application of an analytic model to early readmission rates within the
   Department of Veterans Affairs.
   Wray NP, Peterson NJ, Souchek J, Ashton CM, Hollingsworth JC
5. International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification codes in discharge abstracts are poor measures of complication occurrence in medical inpatients.
   Geraci JM, Ashton CM, Kuykendall DH, Johnson ML, Wu L
6. Identifying complications and low provider adherence to normative practices using administrative data.
   Kuykendall DH, Ashton CM, Johnson ML, Geraci JM
7. In-patient workload in medical specialties: 2. Profiles of individual diagnoses from linked statistics.
   Ashton CM, Ferguson JA, Goldacre MJ
8. Using administrative databases to evaluate the quality of medical care: a conceptual framework.
   Wray NP, Ashton CM, Kuykendall DH, Hollingsworth JC
9. In-hospital complications among survivors of admission for congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or diabetes mellitus.
   Geraci JM, Ashton CM, Kuykendall DH, Johnson ML, Wu L