About the Health and Medical Care Archive
Content and Goals
The Health and Medical Care Archive (HMCA) preserves and disseminates data collected by research projects funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to health and health care in the United States. A project of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), HMCA is supported by the Foundation.
Grantmaking by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has been concentrated in four goal areas:
To assure that all Americans have access to quality health care at reasonable cost
To improve the quality of care and support for people with chronic health conditions
To promote healthy communities and lifestyles
To reduce the personal, social, and economic harm caused by substance abuse--tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs
Currently, the Foundation groups most of its grantmaking into four clusters called portfolios: Human Capital, Vulnerable Populations, Pioneer, and Targeted. The latter addresses a group of critical issues: Childhood Obesity, Health Insurance Coverage, Public Health, and Quality/Equality.
These areas constitute the subject matter of the data collections in HMCA, which include surveys of health care professionals, investigations of access to medical care, evaluations of innovative programs for the delivery of health care, and surveys on substance abuse.
Submission Procedures
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation requires many of the research projects that it funds to deposit their data with HMCA. In collaboration with HMCA, the timely submission of these data collections is closely monitored by the Foundation. HMCA provides consultation, by telephone and written communication, to Foundation grantees on the preparation of their data collections in a manner most optimal for secondary analysis. To this end, grantees also are furnished with ICPSR's Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving (PDF 1.3MB), which was produced with generous support from the Foundation. The preferred data formats for submissions to HMCA are ASCII, SAS transport, SPSS portable, and Stata files. We strongly recommend that data depositors use the ICPSR Electronic Data Deposit Form to securely upload files via their Web browser.
Data Processing Activities
Once received, each data collection is reviewed and processed by HMCA to ensure completeness, accuracy, portability, and respondent confidentiality. Data files are usually released in the original data formats provided by principal investigators, together with any submitted setups (generally SAS and/or SPSS setups). If data files are not submitted in ASCII format, ASCII versions of the data are added to the collection by HMCA. Searchable metadata are produced for every study, and original technical documentation is scanned, edited, and augmented as needed. For some collections, HMCA staff generate univariate frequencies and prepare SAS, SPSS, and/or Stata setups.
In November 2007, we began a project to retrofit selected previously processed HMCA data collections with the full ICPSR suite of setups and data formats. The full suite comprises SAS, SPSS, and Stata setups and five data formats: SAS, SPSS, Stata, column-delimited ASCII, and tab-delimited ASCII.
Dissemination and Preservation
HMCA distributes the processed data collections to enable secondary analyses and provides technical support to users of the data. ICPSR is committed to preserving the archival holdings of HMCA in perpetuity.
