Data Watch
Perhaps consumers lead the quest for on-line health information, but providers are close on their heels. One site that serves both audiences is AHD.com (the American Hospital Directory, www.ahd.com), which attracts 2,000 visitors a day. AHD.com is the 1997 creation of QuadraMed Corp., based in San Rafael, CA.
Features
The content includes key performance measurements of individual hospitals and organizational highlights, including:
• services offered;
• type of ownership;
• 20 most frequent DRGs;
• statistics broken down by medical service, such as average length of stay and number of Medicare patients;
• statistics for the top 25 procedures;
• morbidity and mortality rates;
• clinical performance compared to other facilities;
• financial statements;
• utilization statistics;
• cost analysis.
Functions
Health care industry users include professionals and analysts seeking to track trends, compare medical services, or extract data for marketing or benchmarking. Expect consumers, including the media, to check out a facility’s accreditation or to compare service costs among providers in a given market. Recently, AHD.com integrated data from Health Forum, an American Hospital Association subsidiary. It is the first appearance of the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey data on the Internet.
Costs
• Free services include summary data for most hospitals.
• Subscription services offer more detailed information about individual hospitals. Annual subscriptions cost $395 per user, with discounts for multiple users within an organization. Due to partnership arrangements with QuadraMed, discounts also go to members of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, based in Westchester, IL, and the National Association of Health Data Organizations in Salt Lake City.
• Custom data services include custom reports and databases, mailing lists, and contact files.
Information
Megan Riske, Sterling Hager Inc. Telephone: (617) 926-6665, ext. 248. E-mail: [email protected].
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