A nonprofit, nongovernmental organization in Ann Arbor, Michigan, established in 1955, which collects, processes, and distributes data on hospital use for management, evaluation and research purposes. The two main programs of CPHA are the Professional Activity Study (PAS) and the Medical Audit Program (MAP) which represent a continuing study of hospital practice. More than 1,800 hospitals throughout the United States, Canada, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Australia participate in PAS and MAP. PAS hospitals account for almost 40 percent of all patients discharged from short-term general hospitals in the United States and Canada. The system abstracts and classifies information from medical records in a standard format. The computer-accessible data library at CPHA now contains information on more than 86,000,000 hospitalizations—the world’s largest collection of such data—and is growing at the rate of approximately 14,000,000 abstracts annually. CPHA is sponsored by the American College of Physicians, American College of Surgeons, American Hospital Association, and Southwestern Michigan Hospital Council.
An independent nonprofit organization based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, dedicated to the improvement of health care quality through the use of comparative data. It was formed in 1955 with the national sponsorship of the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American College of Surgeons (ACS), and the American Hospital Association (AHA). CPHA provides certain shared clinical and management information services (MIS) data processing, per¬ forms interpretive research services for hospitals and other health care institutions, and disseminates information to the health care field. Its largest and oldest program is the prototype hospital discharge abstract system, the Professional Activity Study (PAS).