Toward an inventory of U.S. health care data bases.

Because researchers have lacked convenient and comprehensive sources of information about data available to them from the health care data bases maintained by others in their field, many health care data collection activities are unnecessarily duplicative and many data bases have not been fully exploited. This paper presents the preliminary results of work by the Hospital Data Center of the American Hospital Association on an inventory of current (1976 to the present), nonbibliographic, computer-readable data bases containing national health care information that have been collected by organizations and agencies throughout the United States and that are, or can be, made available to outside researchers. The 30 public and private sector organizations identified as having such data bases are listed, together with the titles and main subject areas of their 112 data bases.