American Hospital Association Guide to the Health Care Field

The American Hospital Association (AHA) Abridged Guide on Diskette is a reference source for information on health care institutions. There are two components to the diskette system. The Hospital Data component, offered since 1987, contains more than 100 of the most sought after AHA data base items on approximately 7,000 AHA-registered and osteopathic hospitals, including hospital location, facility and services, expenses, basic utilization, and health care system (formerly named "multihospital system") identification. The Health Care Provider component was added in 1989. This component includes information on providers other than hospitals, listed in Section D of the AHA Guide to the Health Care Field. Specifically, the Health Care Provider component contains bibliographic information on Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), Freestanding Ambulatory Surgery Centers (FASCs), Hospices, and Hospice Agencies, covering 2,000+ providers of health care. The program disk is menu driven. Data are in "straight" ASCII. Support programs allow users to export data into "comma delimited" ASCII, "comma delimited" Lotus, and DIF, which are adaptable to a variety of software (e.g., Lotus, dBase, Paradox).

 

Source: AHA

Size: 1988: 13 original diskettes; 1989: 16 original diskettes

Years: 1988-1993

Media: Diskettes

Format: Menu driven program is provided in ASCII (standard data format [SDF] "straight")

RecordLength: Hospital Data: not available; Health Care Providers: 240

Structure: 1 record per Hospital or Health Care Provider

Complexity: Simple; requires installation of program file to hard drive using DOS copy command, or system can be run from diskette.