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Welcome to HIVnet

Sponsored by:

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
HIV/AIDS Bureau, Health Resources and Services Administration
Office of AIDS Research, National Institutes of Health


HIVnet: A tool that provides statistics on medical resource utilization by persons with HIV infection.


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HIVnet Overview

HIVnet is a tool that provides information on inpatient and outpatient utilization by persons with HIV disease. This information is valuable for service providers, program planners, policymakers, and health services researchers. HIVnet is focused on health services delivery. It does not contain information on outcomes of treatment for HIV infection or on how to access HIV-related services in your community.

HIVnet provides easy access to selected statistics on patterns of HIV-related care. These statistics are based on data collected by the HIV Research Network (HIVRN).

Users of HIVnet should be aware that these statistics represent circumstances at several large HIV practices. The data are not based on a national probability sample, and the data may not represent circumstances at practices that see relatively few HIV-infected patients.

To ensure that the identities of patients and practices remain confidential, HIVnet does not contain any information that can identify individual patients or providers. For the same reason, information on the geographic region of the country is not available. HIVnet enables users to examine resource utilization for specific demographic and clinical subgroups. To preserve confidentiality, however, HIVnet reports only one subgroup breakdown at a time; users cannot obtain resource utilization statistics for combinations of factors (such as a combination of gender, race, and age). For cross-tabulations, information for cells with small numbers of patients is also suppressed.

 

Description of the HIV Research Network

The goal of the HIV Research Network (HIVRN) is to obtain, analyze, and disseminate current information on the delivery of services to people with HIV infection. Treatment of HIV infection is complex. New drugs are being developed rapidly, and treatment guidelines change frequently. Policymakers, service providers, and patients need to know how often people with HIV infection receive specific services, and what factors are related to receiving more or fewer services. The HIVRN was designed to disseminate this information widely, using the most recent available data.

The HIVRN currently includes 18 medical practices located across the United States that treat more than 14,000 patients. Each practice collects information on the clinical and demographic characteristics of their patients with HIV infection, the medications they are prescribed, and the frequency of each patient's outpatient clinic visits, and the number of inpatient admissions. Each practice sends information to the data coordinating center located at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, which consolidates this information into a single uniform database. Statistics in the HIVnet are based on this database.

At present, statistics displayed on the HIVnet are derived from the 12 medical practices that provided comprehensive resource utilization data for 2000. The statistics combine data from the 12 sites, and the sample size for statistics varies, depending on the extent of missing data.

The HIVRN is sponsored by several Federal agencies: the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the HIV/AIDS Bureau in the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and the Office of AIDS Research in the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health (OAR/NIH).


HIVnet is based on aggregate statistics, so not all possible queries can be addressed. If a query is not possible, HIVnet will not allow you to choose certain parameters.

If you have any questions or comments concerning the HIV Research Network, please contact us through E-mail at JFleishm@ahrq.gov

Current as of February 2003


Internet Citation:

HIVnet. HIV Resource Utilization Data Coordinating Center (DCC) project. February 2003. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/data/HIVnet.htm


 

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