Table 3.
Online Compendia of Secondary Datasets
| Compendium | Web address | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) Research Dataset Compendium | www.sgim.org/go/datasets | Designed to assist investigators conducting research on existing datasets, with a particular emphasis on health services research, clinical epidemiology, and research on medical education. Includes information on strengths and weaknesses of datasets and the insights of experienced users about making best use of the data |
| National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR) | http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/index.html | This group of sites provides links to a wide variety of data tools and statistics, including research datasets, data repositories, health statistics, survey instruments, and more. It is sponsored by the National Library of Medicine |
| Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) | https://www.icpsr.umich.edu | World’s largest archive of digital social science data, including many datasets with extensive information on health and health care. ICPSR includes many sub-archives on specific topic areas, including minority health, international data, substance abuse, and mental health, and more |
| Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce | http://phpartners.org/health_stats.html | Provides links to a variety of national, state, and local health and public health datasets. Also provides links to sites providing a wide variety of health statistics, information on health information technology and standards, and other resources. Sponsored by a collaboration of US government agencies, public health organizations, and health sciences libraries |
| Canadian Research Data Centres | http://www.statcan.gc.ca/rdc-cdr/index-eng.htm | Links to datasets available for analysis through Canada’s Research Data Centres (RDC) program |
| Directory of Health and Human Services Data Resources (US Dept. of Health and Human Services) | http://aspe.hhs.gov/datacncl/DataDir/index.shtml | This site provides brief information and links to almost all datasets from National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other agencies of the US Department of Health and Human Services |
| National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) | http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/index.htm | This site links to a variety of datasets from the National Center for Health Statistics, several of which are profiled in Table 4. These datasets are available for downloading at no cost |
| Medicare Research Data Assistance Center (RESDAC); and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Research, Statistics, Data & Systems | www.resdac.umn.edu/Available_CMS_Data.asp | These sites link to a variety of datasets from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) |
| Veterans Affairs (VA) data | www.virec.research.va.gov/index.htm | A series of datasets using administrative and computerized clinical data to describe care provided in the VA health care system, including information on outpatient visits, pharmacy data, inpatient data, cost data, and more. With some exceptions, use is generally restricted to researchers with VA affiliations (this can include a co-investigator with a VA affiliation) |