The American Hospital Association's National Data Network and hospital data bases

The growth and increasing complexity of the hospital industry has created an urgent need for hospital data. However, existing data bases have not been used as extensively or as intensively as they could be. This paper describes the major data bases of the American Hospital Association--the Annual Survey of Hospitals, the National Hospital Panel Survey, and the Special Surveys--and then discusses the American Hospital Association National Data Network, a remote-access, computer-time-sharing system that provides on-line entry into the AHA's data bases. The speed, economy, and ease with which Network data can be retrieved and manipulated means that national hospital data can now be disseminated more widely throughout the health care industry and can be regularly used for decision making even at the institutional level.