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Administrative Data Systems

7. Illustrations

As noted in the preceding sections, the use of administrative data in social science-based research about health care systems has become increasingly prevalent in the field today.

Most major health care policy studies rely upon one source of administrative data or another.

It is rare for a month to go by without one of the major medical journals including the results of an observational study based in part, or completely, on administrative data drawn from health care insurers, vital statistics, or state-wide or national hospital discharge data.  A brief look at the scientific agenda for AcademyHealth in any recent year will reveal that the preponderance of presentations relies upon one or more types of administrative health care data. 

In this section two research programs are described in terms of:

  • The intellectual contributions that they’ve made to their respective fields;
  • The methodological work they’ve advanced to test the quality of the data; and
  • The meaningfulness of the measures they’ve constructed based upon administrative health data. 
Accounts on the OBSSR e-Learning site enable you to save notes as you read the contents of the site.  Notes are a way for you to save a spot on the site with your own comments and title applied to it.  Think of it as putting a sticky note paper in a book to remember a place and leave a thought or two of your own for later reference.