I ran across this Web site and remembered that as a hospital librarian
I spent time looking (usually unsuccessfully) for this kind of
data for administrators and some clinicians needing comparative
data for articles. Of course, that was before the Web.
Take a look at <http://www.health-mart.net>. It provides comparative hospital data by diagnosis for almost every hospital in the US. Data on average charge, average payment, average length of stay and mortality is available for free. Of course other, more detailed, information is available by a subscription to their service. The site was partly the product of a Health Care Financing Administration grant to determine the feasibility of placing this kind of information on the Internet. Obviously that's why the free info. But it may provide an answer to your next question from administrator.
Maryanne Blake
HLIB-NW List Manager
originally posted to hlib-nw, 7-29-99, by Maryanne Blake
Attention: Libraries that use Docline and OCLC!
If your medical library uses both Docline and OCLC, would you
be interested in getting your up-to-date journal holdings into
OCLC by using the data you've already entered into SERHOLD, without
having to enter the data twice? If you're at all interested, read
on...
For a number of years, medical libraries in Washington State have
used SERHOLD data produced by NLM to add our journal holdings
to the WLN database. (Before its merger with OCLC, WLN was a bibliographic
utility serving primarily the Pacific Northwest region. Their
database was available both online and as a CD-ROM product.) We
did this as part of our common mission to serve the citizens of
Washington by making our holdings known to the larger (i.e., public)
library community.
After the merger of WLN & OCLC in January 1999, we were told
that OCLC, unlike WLN, does not do batch uploads into their database
from SERHOLD tapes. This was bad news because we would still like
to get our holdings out to a larger audience without having to
re-enter all the data we've already put into SERHOLD.
I have recently learned that the folks in Dublin may be willing
to come up with a procedure for uploading SERHOLD data into the
OCLC database IF THERE IS SUFFICIENT DEMAND! So, that is my question:
Are there other medical libraries, outside of Washington State,
who would also be interested in getting their journal holdings
into OCLC (without having to enter all the holdings data again)
by having the records uploaded from SERHOLD? If you are, OCLC
needs to know!
The contact person at OCLC is:
The promise that modern information storage devices--from magnetic tape to compact disks--would make data inviolate and everlasting is not becoming a reality, according to archivists. Not only are storage device materials subject to aging or accidental corruption, some of the technologies used to record data are becoming obsolete, which threatens to make it nearly impossible to retrieve even the data that does survive. The National Media Lab reports that magnetic tape, floppy disks, hard disks, and videotape can only survive for about 10 years and that CD-ROM is more vulnerable to damage and information loss than originally was thought. In order to assuage part of the problem, the National Archives maintains a collection of out-of-use data storage devices dating back to early steel-wire sound recorders that it uses to transfer old recordings and data onto newformats. (Newsweek 07/12/99)
from Educause, 9 July 1999
Life Before the Computer
An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity
A keyboard was a piano.
Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3 ½" floppy
You hoped no one found out.
Compress was something you did to the garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for a while!
Log on was adding wood to the fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a back up happened to your commode.
Cut - you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu.
I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper
And the memory in my head
I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead!
submitted by Frances R. Childers, 6-22-99