Health Administration Resource Guide: Federal Government

The Department of Health and Human Services is the federal agency which protects the health of Americans and provides essential human services. Agencies within the department include the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The site provides data, policies and regulations, disease information, medicaid and health information, food safety, domestic violence research, and mental health info.

Use this site to enroll in the new Federal Healthcare options.

The NIH leads medical and behavioral research in the country and funds scientific studies at universities and research institutions. The website includes an index of health resources by topic, grant news and applications, and scientific resources, such as the National Library of Medicine.

Run by the National Institutes of Health, NLM claims to be "the world's largest medical library." Medline via PubMed Central allows searching of over 14 million citations from biomedical journal articles back to the 1950's. Only a small number of full-text articles are available.

Medline can be searched through the Sawyer Library's EBSCO database and includes some linked full-text.

AHRQ, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, charged with supporting research to improve the quality of health care, reduce its cost, improve patient safety, decrease medical errors, and provide access to services. The website offers consumer health information, clinical practice guidelines, and selected full-text reports. Includes data and survey information.

HCUPnet is a tool for identifying and analyzing statistics on hospitals at the national, regional, and state levels. It allows user-defined parameters for data access.

The AHRQ maintains a Grants On-line database of AHRQ funded grants and research.

The NQMC is a database for information on health care quality measures and measure sets, providing practitioners, health care providers, health plans, and delivery systems with a mechanism for obtaining detailed information on quality measures. Includes abstracts about measures, a utility for comparing attributes of two or more measures, and links to full-text quality measures, when available.

QualityTools is a clearinghouse providing practical tools for assessing, measuring, and improving the quality of America's health care. Aimed at health care providers, health plans, policymakers, purchasers, and patients, the QualityTools provide abstracts and links to full-text tools (reports, surveys, and fact sheets) and/or ordering information. Keyword searchable.

MEPS collects data on health services in order to provide policymakers, health care administrators, business, and others with information about health care use and costs in the United States. Survey components include household data on medical expenditure, insurance plan data, and medical provider expenditures. Survey instruments are available in PDF.

CDC Stacks is a free, digital archive of scientific research and literature produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This database provides searchable access to current CDC research plus historical volumes.

Website provides full-text and abstracts of surgeon general reports, conference reports, and proceedings. Links to press releases, speeches, and testimony.

A comprehensive database of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and other documents, produced by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the American Medical Association (AMA). Components of the NGC database include guideline abstracts, links to many full-text guidelines, and a guideline comparison utility that generates side-by-side comparisons.

CMS’, (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) programs include Medicare, Medicaid, State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), and Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). Includes Medicare consumer ( Eligibility Tool) and provider (policies, regulations, etc.) information.

The FDA's website offers the searchable text of the Orange Book (approved drugs), the texts of the laws the FDA enforces, links to pertinent Federal Registers and federal codes, forms, docket listings, news, compliance references, congressional testimony, and more.