Health Systems and Provider Database (HSPD) Methodology - Data Resources

The content herein provides technical details concerning the development and elements of the Health Systems and Provider Database (HSPD) created by a research team primarily based at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and led by Nancy Beaulieu (Harvard Medical School) with support from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) under the Comparative Health Systems Performance (CHSP) Initiative, grant No. U19HS024072. The HSPD is the sole responsibility of the NBER and does not necessarily represent the official views of the AHRQ.

Since the commencement of this research initiative in 2015, we have been working in collaboration with several institutional partners to identify relationships among health care providers and the impact of these relationships on the delivery of evidence-based care, clinical and economic outcomes, and patient experiences. Critical to this research program are the data to describe health care organizations and to measure performance. In this context, a key output of our work has been the creation of the HSPD.

As new data become available, new versions of the HSPD will be generated. While the HSPD is not publicly available at this time, we hope to make the data available in some form in the near future. We will post updates to this site as new versions of the HSPD are generated and when information concerning public dissemination of the dataset becomes available.

The HSPD was created by a dedicated team of investigators, programmers, and analysts (a.k.a. the Data Core Team). Maurice Dalton played a key role in the design and implementation of the computer algorithm that forms the networks on which health systems in the HSPD are based. Some of our original team members have moved on to next steps in their professional careers. We are grateful for everyone’s hard work and collaboration, without which the HSPD would not exist. All of the individuals who have worked directly on the development of the HSPD are listed below. We gratefully acknowledge the meaningful contributions made by several colleagues involved in this research effort, and the encouragement, support, and feedback we have received from our AHRQ project officers, Richard Kronick (former Director of AHRQ), members of the CHSP technical advisory panel, David Jones at Mathematica Policy Research, and colleagues at the Dartmouth and RAND Centers of Excellence.

  • David Cutler, Principal Investigator
  • Nancy Beaulieu, Co-Investigator and Data Core Leader
  • Michael Briskin
  • Maurice Dalton
  • Zakaria El Amrani El Idrissi
  • Gregory Foster
  • Angela Gu
  • Stephen Hines
  • Helene Machado
  • Annette Urganus
  • Robert Wild
  • Rachel Wu

Click here to access the technical details concerning the development and elements of the HSPD in PDF format.

To learn more:

HSPD data will soon be available. A version with limited data elements will be available at the NBER Public Use Data Archive. A version linkable to claims data will be available to academic researchers through a data use agreement with NBER.