Data Collection

American Hospital Association/Health Forum

The Health Forum, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American Hospital Assocation, provides communications, information, education and research products and services that advance leadership for health. These services empower health care providers, suppliers, payers and consumers with new knowledge. Health Forum is the AHA unit responsible for generating and publishing data concerning all aspects of the hospital industry.

Key Business Challenge:

• Insure data consistency and quality for nation’s most comprehesive data source on hospital industry
• Provide a survey solution to a diverse group of users, including state hospital associations wishing to integrate their own surveys into the AHA survey
• Develop an effective solution that enables major cost savings via automation

The Solution

TWJ has worked with the Health Forum subsidiary of the AHA for the past 7 years in a collaborative, multi-phase venture that including moving that organization’s comprehensive annual survey of the nation’s 6000 hospitals onto the Internet in 2001 via a TWJ-developed Web application. That application includes a rule-based system for insuring data quality that contains hundreds of complex data validation rules, enabling AHA to continue to provide the nation’s premier data set on the hospital industry. TWJ’s solution also enabled state hospital associations to use the survey tool to easily incorporate their own hospital surveys into the annual AHA survey. This successful venture resulted in cost savings to the AHA of over $250,000 annually and motivated Health Forum to commission TWJ to develop a Java-based generic version of the survey tool for commercial purposes in the health care research field. TWJ continues to work with Health Forum to refine the Web survey application to meet new hospital and research needs.