Datasets – xInformatics.org

There is a wide array of common health care datasets that are used as the source data to generate thousands of academic papers each year.

These common datasets are accessible to academic and sometimes non-academic researchers through various licensing contacts.

Below is a subset of existing databases with the number of references from PubMed broken down by year. As we can see there are hundreds of papers being published each year utilizing these individual datasets.

Some of the goals from examining the literature of these datsets are:

Quantify the number of publications and related author/organizational information.
Identify the Study Type (e.g. Association, Prevalence, Risk, etc.) of each publication.
Identify the Medical Condition(s)/Procedure(s) of each publication.
Quantify the statistical methods used in the analysis of these datasets.
Collate the cost of generating these publications and also the cost of publicly accessing this knowledge.

To understand and quantify the Literature the following software is utilized: www.Synthesis.info

Type	Name	Abbv	Country
Health Survey	Canadian Community Health Survey	CCHS	CA
Administrative	Discharge Abstract Database	DAD	CA
Administrative	National Ambulatory Care Reporting System	NACRS	CA
Quality Improvement	National Surgical Quality Improvement Program	NSQIP	US
Administrative	Nationwide Inpatient Sample	NIS	US
Health Survey	Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System	BRFSS	US
Critical Care EMR	Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III	MIMIC	US
Quality Improvement	InterRAI Community Health Assessment	InterRAI	US
EMR	The Health Improvement Network	THIN	UK
Health Survey	Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System	BRFSS	US
Health Survey	National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey	NHANES	US
Various	The Secure Anonymised Information Linkage Databank	SAIL	UK
Trauma	National Trauma Data Bank	NTDB	US