The NBER has a collection of American Hospital Association's Annual Survey data (AHA Annual Survey) ranging from 1972 - the latest available year. The NBER is under a license agreement with Health Forum and is able to provide access to this data for projects conducted by NBER Affiliated faculty. According to our agreement, the NBER cannot make this data available to Graduate Students for their own dissertation work. Representatives at Health Forum have informed us that they work with the Graduate Students directly to provide custom cut of the data at a discounted/reasonable cost. Please email data@nber.org if you would like to be connected with the AHA representative.
There are certain restrictions for NBER affiliated faculty as as well. Here is the process for NBER affiliates to use the American Hospital Association (AHA) data at the NBER.
Any potential user needs to fill out and sign the certification and send it along with an abstract for the research and how the AHA will be used to data@nber.org. Every person touching the AHA data is considered a user and has to sign the AHA certification form. Whoever is collecting the materials from the project team can forward to material (preferably in a batch) to data@nber.org for action.
Projects are tracked in the Data Use Agreements (DUA) database and the corresponding Institutional Review Board (IRB). Although the AHA is not human subjects data, we send the materials to our IRB so she can reach out to the investigators to inquire whether they are matching to human subjects data. In most cases, they are and we make sure they get the proper IRB review. Once that step is complete, we can set up data access.
The agreement does not allow users access to the full file, rather the user submits a list of variables and years and NBER IT staff prepare an extract. Currently, the list is in the form of a Stata .do file. See example.do for reference. Available variables differ by year. Many variables change from byte or int to str in more recent years. All variables in the extract will be of type str. Please check that any requested variable is available in at least one of the requested years. That field will be present with a missing value indicator in other years. Note that "long" is a reserved word in Stata, we have renamed the variable "lon". Lastly, note that in the .dta, all variable names are converted to lower case.
Our agreement with AHA requires that the files be used on our servers, and not downloaded. Row or column aggregates may be downloaded, as can small numbers of individual data points.