Lown Institute Hospitals Index

General description

1. Database primary purpose - Examine hospital social responsibility, calculating scores across 53 different metrics to capture performance in what really matters to the communities they serve.
2. Overall data type - Health facilities
3. Dataset type - Longitudinal
4. Data source - Claims, Registry/cohort, survey, Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
5. Data level - Hospital level
6. Geographic location of the data collection sites - United States
7. Sponsor, manager, or home institution - Lown Institute
8. Date range - 2021 - 2022
9. Geolocation data - State, city, address, zip code, region
10. Hospital identifiers - Hospital name, CMS Certification Number for hospitals, and modified AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) ID for systems
11. Longitudinal tracking - Track hospitals
12. Financial variables - Grades/stars for cost efficiency and pay equity
13. Clinical areas of interest - all
14. Number of records - 3,764 general acute care and critical access hospitals (549 for-profits, 2,444 private nonprofits, and 771 public nonprofits) (1)
15. Variables that are uniquely present in this dataset -
16. Database caveats and limitations - The following types of hospitals are not available: (1) non-acute care and non-critical access hospitals; (2) federal hospitals (e.g. Veterans Health Administration); (3) hospitals outside of the 50 states and Washington D.C.; (4)Kaiser Permanente system hospitals; (5) hospitals with more than 45% admissions for orthopedic, more than 45% for cardiac, more than 80% surgical procedures, more than 80% elective surgeries (among hospitals with > 45% surgical procedures); (6) hospitals that were closed as of October 2021 by checking against Care Compare; and (7) hospitals with patient volume below 50 annual patient stays.

Applicable methods

1. Association models, such as logistic regression (2, 3), Cox regression (4)
2. Area under the curve (5)
3. Propensity scores (6, 7)
4. Mediation analysis (8, 9)

Data dictionary

To access Lown Institute Hospital Index data dictionary, click here

Variable categories

1. Hospital type (e.g., acute care, critical access, academic medical center, safety net, for-profit, non-profit, urban/rural)
2. Rankings (e.g., Lown rank, outcomes rank, equity rank, inclusivity rank)
3. Grades (e.g., for patient safety and experience, avoiding overuse, community benefits)
4. Stars (e.g., quietness, cleanliness, recommendation)

Linkage to other datasets

• Linkages can be established for any dataset that might have geolocation data [e.g., zip code] or hospital identifiers (name, CMS or AHRQ IDs)