To identify opportunities to improve the public’s health, state governments and health services researchers need high-quality, consistently collected data about population health across many areas, including health status, health care utilization, access to care, health care quality, and health care costs. Types of data commonly used for health services research include population-based data (eg, hospital discharge data and Medicare claims data) and sample-based data (eg, data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey). Although both types of data help to answer very important questions related to health services research, each has certain limitations. This document provides an overview of these data.
