The primary sources of data for the hospital-level analysis
come from the Annual Survey of Hospitals provided by the
American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Medicare
Cost Reports provided by the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid (CMS). The AHA data is considered a near
census of U.S. hospitals, providing detailed information on
hospital characteristics. The CMS data provides financial
characteristics and output measures of hospitals that receive
payments from CMS. The data for HIT usage comes from
the Health Information Management Systems Society
(HIMSS) Analytics Database that includes nearly all nonfederal hospitals. In addition, CMS provides Hospital
Compare quality measures that describe how well hospitals
provide recommended care to their patients. Process of care
measures were used as a proxy for the overall quality in U.
S. hospitals [39]. All these datasets are commonly used in
the analysis of U.S. hospitals.