How to Research Health Care Trends

Government authorities, policy experts and academic faculty have been tracking health care trends for a variety of topics for decades. Thanks to the work of foundations, universities, think tanks, and other groups, analysis of these trends is freely available online. Researching health care trends is a moderately easy process, provided you follow a few simple steps and are aware of good research sources.

Instructions

• 1

  Determine a focused topic of interest. Because health care is such a broad topic, there is a virtually limitless amount of data to analyze about trends--health spending, care delivery, success or failure of public programs, birth and death rates, public health scorecards, drug costs and even staffing patterns that affect care delivery are all topics that follow trends. Picking a specific area of interest will make researching health care trends much easier.

• 2

  Use government sources in your research. Virtually all health care trend data passes through government organizations at some point or another--making government sources a primary target in your research will simplify the process of researching health care trends. Sites such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintain databanks and trend sites on their websites. The National Institutes of Health offer resources on disease trends as well as patterns in health care research spending.

• 3

  Look to policy journals and health publications to aid in your research. Health Affairs is the leading policy journal for health care--articles in this journal regularly chart trends in the health care space for a variety of topics. The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association are also two good choices when researching health care trends; although these publications are primarily clinical journals, almost every issue features a trend piece.

• 4

  Rely on nonprofit research foundations and policy think tanks to round out your research on health care trends. The Kaiser Family Foundation, the Center for Studying Health System Change, the Brookings Institution, the Manhattan Institute, the Commonwealth Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute all focus on studying health care issues and trends and offer deep research resources on their web sites and in some cases, in their on-site libraries.

• 5

  Check the health policy departments of major colleges and universities. Local schools are a good source for in-person research, but thanks to the internet, many world-class universities are opening up their department resources for use by researchers from great distances away. Faculty in academic health policy departments frequently publish policy articles about health care trends; in your research through policy journals, note which universities publish more about specific topics and visit that school's website to perform more research about specific faculty members or trends they are watching.