The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is pleased to announce the release of MONAHRQ – My Own Network Powered by AHRQ—a free, MS Windows-based software application that significantly reduces the cost and time a state, hospital, or other organization would need to spend to compile, analyze, and post data on quality of hospital care, its cost, and how that care is used.

MONAHRQ allows users to create a customized, interactive website that can be used for internal quality improvement or reporting quality information to the public. Organizations host the new tool on their own Web server and populate it with their own hospital administrative data.

The website created can provide information in four areas:

• Quality of care for specific hospitals: Information about patient safety, deaths in the hospital, and other quality related issues
• Provision of services by hospital for health conditions and procedures: Information about the number of patient discharges, charges, costs, and length of hospitalizations for specific hospitals
• Potentially avoidable hospitalizations: Create maps of county-by-county rates for potentially avoidable hospitalizations
• Rates of health conditions and procedures: Information about the prevalence of diseases or medical procedures through maps of county-by-county rates for selected conditions and procedures

MONAHRQ version 1.0 is available for download at http://monahrq.ahrq.gov/. For assistance or to join the MONAHRQ Mailing List, please contact MONAHRQ User Support at monahrq@ahrq.gov.