Extra! Extra! Free data available on the Web
Technology is changing health care data industry
You’ve always heard there’s no such thing as a free lunch. So you probably wouldn’t expect a vendor to give your facility something valuable for nothing. But in one particular case, you’d be wrong: Data that you need for your benchmarking efforts are increasingly becoming available for free or at least for much less than you’re used to paying.
One company that’s betting on this idea is Market Insights, a six-year-old firm based in San Francisco. In March, Market Insights began offering free hospital benchmarking data on its Web site (www.marketinsights.com) through a tool called the National Hospital Almanac. Click on "free data" and you can select up to six hospitals for side-by-side comparisons of such information as:
- staffing (by job type);
- financials (common income statement and balance sheet information);
- inpatient costs, charges, length of stay, mortality, and complications (by DRG, product line, and department);
- outpatient costs, charges, and reimbursement (by ambulatory surgery and APC service line).
Rick Louie, founder and director of business development for Market Insights, is the first to point out that you have to pay $1,200 a year to get access to the company’s most recent data. Much of the free data on Market Insights’ Web site dates from 1996.
But depending on what you’re looking for, the free data might just do the trick. If that information is not enough, of course, the company stands ready to provide customized reports from its database, 80% of which comes from the public domain such as the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), and 20% of which comes from client data. Market Insights has five years worth of such data on every hospital in the country.
"I’m amazed at everything I can get through the Internet now that I would have had to pay for five or 10 years ago," Louie says. "Today’s technology is pushing data down to a commodity level."
William Cleverley, founder of The Center for Healthcare Industry Performance Studies (CHIPS) in Columbus, OH, agrees that data are becoming a commodity and says that CHIPS also offers some limited 1997 data free on its Web site. If you’re willing to pay, you can get much more data on the subscriber Web site for $495 a year.
He says that Market Insights’ offering is of some concern to companies like CHIPS who deal mostly with publicly available data. "If you can get something for free, why pay for it? We have a lot of the same data elements they have," Cleverley says. "If you can give something away for free but it entices them back, then you may try and do it. If we all begin to do that, we’ll strangle each other. I think there’s going to be some bloodletting at some point in time. You’re going to see many of these companies consolidating with one another or else going out of business."
So, how will data companies survive? Cleverley says the survivors will redesign formats or introduce new products to make their services unique. CHIPS has already begun that process with new services such as a report that will identify the potential impact of the new ambulatory payment classifications (APCs) under HCFA’s proposed prospective payment system on a hospital’s profitability. CHIPS also recently began offering a balanced scorecard review that offers customized reports that identify areas to improve financial performance.
Cleverley says CHIPS will continue to increase the analysis it offers. "A lot of users have too much data and too little time to interpret them."
Another key issue in the changing data industry is technology, particularly the new capabilities the World Wide Web brings, says Dennis Dunn, senior scientist with the Sachs Group in Evanston, IL. "Everybody’s being forced to make the investment to come up with Web-based delivery methods of their information and analysis," he says.
While this may be creating extra work for the data companies, it’s making life easier for benchmarkers. "This can only benefit planners," Dunn says. "Data will be more widely available, and the pressure will keep the cost down. It’s so much easier to comparison-shop on the Web. That is particularly true for public data offerings. People used to charge hundreds of dollars for a report that you can now get on Market Insights’ Web site for free. It’s simply not going to be possible for a company to offer a $1,000 provider comparison report."
Dunn cautions that the type of free data you might find on the Web — even Sachs offers some on its site — is probably not enough for serious benchmarking. "It might be useful for people who are making the first baby steps into benchmarking or for occasional data users who need quick information, like who is the biggest player in a certain market," he says. "But people with serious market size will need more."
He also warns planners not to believe everything they find on the Web. "Taking information at face value can be very dangerous," Dunn says. "This is typically information that is being submitted to fiscal intermediaries, some of whom clean the data a lot and some of whom don’t. The quality really varies."
John Morrow, senior vice president for Baltimore-based HCIA Inc. agrees that planners should check out a company’s reputation before putting stock in its data offerings. He says many of the public data sets that come from HCFA are not reliable enough to merit HCIA’s trust.
"There are probably a dozen places you can go on the Internet and get some data, and I’m not sure I would trust any of it," Morrow says. "If I’m a business person making business decisions based on data, I’d better really have a strong conviction about the source of the data, the efficacy, and the utilization of that data. We as Americans are consumed with statistics, and we’ll believe almost anything we hear."
Morrow says HCIA also offers some free data in the hopes that clients will be willing to spend more for the extra value the company offers. "HCIA pretty much started this industry in 1985," he says. "Now our business is centered around value-added services. The real insight is in the findings, not the data."
Eleanor Anderson-Miles, former director of corporate communications for MECON Associates in San Ramon, CA, says the key issue for all data companies in the current market is providing information on how to use the data. "Statistics don’t mean anything if you don’t know what they represent," she says.
Since January, MECON’s customers have enjoyed an absolute Web-based technology that allows them to access the company’s data warehouse through the Web. MECON is introducing technology that enables clients to go to the Web site and find benchmarking partners. "We will have discussion boards for people working on the same issues and a way to spotlight best practices like never before," Anderson-Miles says.
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