Building a Broader Vision of Healthcare Data: Quantifying Healthcare Regulations

Even with the wide array of healthcare data available, the National Association for Healthcare Data Organization challenged its participants to propose novel types of healthcare data. We responded by presenting a new tool, Health RegDate, to quantify healthcare regulations.

Health RegData taps into the Mercatus Center’s policy analytics capabilities and applies them to the healthcare sector. It measures the total number of healthcare regulations and their complexity, the number of restrictions, and the sub-industries of healthcare to which those regulations apply.

Measuring the regulatory burden on healthcare is of crucial importance when we know the role that regulations have played in shaping the healthcare system over the centuries. We spend more on healthcare per capita than any country in the world, but do not necessarily have better health outcomes. Might regulations be to blame?

We hope to answer this question by integrating regulatory data derived from Health RegData into studies on healthcare outcomes, access, and spending. Thanks to the insights developed by researchers using these data, we will identify areas for potential policy reforms.