Building a Database of Data Sets for Health Services Research

The Database of Data Sets (DB/DS) for Health Services Research will be an online searchable directory of data sets which are available, often with restrictions and confidentiality safeguards, for use by health care researchers. The DB/DS project is aimed at a wide audience, and intends to include a very broad range of health care data sets, ranging from state hospital discharge data bases, to national registries and health survey data sets, to institutional clinical databases. The intended users are the same community of researchers, policy-makers, administrators and practitioners who are served by the National Library of Medicine's current bibliographic databases. This paper describes a pilot phase of the DB/DS project in which the issues involved in creating such a database were explored with an initial set of 20 representative data sets.