Dr. Harrison acquired access to several very large data sets from the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for use in his research on hospital leadership and health systems planning. The data was divided over multiple files and not in the correct format for his analysis needs. Dr. Harrison brought the data sets to the Center for Instruction & Research Technology where CIRT staff assisted with several data management tasks including: merging, cleaning, querying, and transforming the data. They also provided assistance in converting data from one format to another.

Dr. Harrison then used data-envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to evaluate the efficiency of religious not-for-profit hospitals and determine trends. Dr. Harrison published his findings in Hospital Topics: Research and Perspectives on Healthcare with the article “The Improving Efficiency Frontier of Religious Not-for-Profit Hospitals.

CIRT can assist with conversions between Excel, Access, SAS, and SPSS, as well as the creation of publication-ready charts and graphs from data.