UHC picks Picker for patient surveys
The University Hospital Consortium (UHC), Oak Brook, Ill., has signed an agreement with The Picker Institute to provide a wide range of patient satisfaction surveys and follow-up services. The UHC is an alliance of academic health centers throughout the U.S. Under its agreement with The Picker Institute, patient satisfaction surveys will be conducted for adult medical/surgical, pediatric and obstetric inpatients, as well as ambulatory surgery and emergency care patients and physician-office outpatients. The Picker Institute, Boston, helps health care organizations develop strategies for assessing and improving patient care that address patient needs and concerns, as they define them. It has conducted research on patient-centered care in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. for the past seven years.
Tri-CR available as toolkit
Tri-CR, the recognition technology in Cardiff Software Inc.'s Teleform, is now available as a toolkit. Tri-CR enhances and translates hand-print and machine-print inforn1ation from images received via fax machine or scanner. Tri-CR's DLL access is designed to meet the needs of Windows developers with robust function calls for hand-print recognition, machine-print recognition, field syntax, context checking, character/ multi-line segmentation and dictionary matching.
Saporito offers insurance industry database
Saporito & Associates, Inc., a New York research and consulting firm specializing in the insurance industry, has released INSCite, a new electronic insurance industry information database. INSCite contains over 1,300 insurance industry information resource citations and descriptive abstracts. Resource types include books, databases, periodicals. insurance libraries, policy forms and coverage interpretation sources, publishers, statistical sources, trade and professional associations and stock analysis. The product is organized by line of business and/or operational area with key resource types within each area such as: line of business (general insurance, bonding, casualty, employee benefits, health, life, etc.), operations (claims, data processing, loss control, marketing, underwriting, etc.), law and regulation, education, careers and licensing, and more. INSCite is a Folio Infobase, running on Folio Views 3.1 for Windows software. It includes fulltext searching of every word in the database as well as print and file export capabilities. It also includes hypertext links from each database record to publisher and trade association information.
Deadline upcoming to participate in 40+ study
The Maturing Marketplace Institute, a division of Strategic Directions Group, Inc., Minneapolis, will conduct its fifth annual 40+ industryspecific shared-cost study in January 1996. Deadline for joining one or more of the studies is November 30, 1995. The study's sample is 3,000 persons 40 and older. The questionnaire covers the attitudes, behaviors, media usage, direct marketing responsiveness, activities and demographics of baby boomers and their elders. Topics such as industry attributes, specific products, new product usage, couponing and brand loyalty are addressed. Participation is limited to three companies within the seven industries covered. Participating companies receive a half-page or more for their own proprietary questions within a 16-page questionnaire. The use of one of five separate 40+ segmentation strategies developed by Strategic Directions Group is included at no additional cost.
New products, capabilities from Equifax NDS
Equifax National Decision Systems, Atlanta, has introduced Consumer-Facts, a database on spending patterns for more than 400 products and services in more than 15 major categories, with regional spending differences incorporated. In addition to current year estimates, it provides five-year projections reflecting the impact of economic and demographic conditions such as income, employment, population and household changes, on consumer spending. The database was created jointly by Equifax NDS and The WEFA Group (Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates). The database was built using information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau, combined with The WEFA Group's economic forecasting abilities and Equifax NDS' demographic estimates and forecasts. The data is available to license via Infomark for Windows and in diskette, magnetic tape and CD formats.
Equifax NDS has also issued Infomark for Windows 6.2, the newest version of its desktop market data delivery and analysis system. The new version has database updates and software enhancements, including Consumer-Facts and ArcView 2.1, a desktop mapping and analysis program from Environmental Systems Research Institute. Users can export data directly from Infomark into Arc View, allowing them to compare multiple data sets on one screen and to display, query, integrate and analyze multiple data types, including their own data.
Through an agreement with Equifax NDS, users of desktop mapping software from Maplnfo Corp. will find it easier to integrate Equifax NDS' marketing data into their MapInfo system. The agreement enables Equifax NDS to offer its more than 60 databases, including its Micro Vision customer segmentation system, in native MapInfo format. Deliverable on CDs, diskettes or through lnfomark, the data can be imported directly into MapInfo for analysis, eliminating a conversion process.
SPSS ships neural net program
SPSS is now shipping Neural Connection, its new neural network computing product. Neural Connection has a set of 15 data management, modeling, forecasting and presentation tools to provide flexible data analysis. Users prepare data by viewing distributions and transforming values within the application. The product includes three neural network tools for prediction, classification, time series analysis and data segmentation. It also includes three statistical tools that let users build hybrid models or benchmark neural model results side by side.
Viewpoint 1.1 captures outcomes data
National Computer Systems (NCS), Minneapolis, has released a new version of its NCS Viewpoint software that allows users to capture and report patient outcomes data as well as patient satisfaction data. NCS Viewpoint 1.1 software includes the questionnaires and normative databases from two widely accepted instruments for monitoring patient outcomes: the Health Status Questionnaire 2.0, developed by Health Outcomes Institute, and the SF-36, developed by the Medical Outcomes Trust. The software is intended to make it easier and less costly for hospitals, group practices, long-term care facilities and managed care organizations to collect and interpret data.
Decisionmark inks links with data providers for desktop package
Decisionmark Corp. of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has signed agreements with several information providers to make their data usable with Decisionmark's soon-to-be-released Proximity desktop software package. Proximity users will be able to access Chicago-based National Research Bureau's comprehensive 1995 data on U.S. shopping centers with total gross leasable area of 750,000 square feet or more. Users of the new software will also have the option to license NRB' s complete shopping center database, including almost 34.000 center locations and more than 450,000 retail locations. The system will also make available American Business Information's database on more than 10 million U.S. businesses, including 3.8 million small business owners, 148,000 big businesses, 8,500 public companies, 220,000 growing businesses and 1.1 million professionals. In addition, Proximity will contain subsets of Equifax's 1995 Business Summary Variables, 1995 and 2000 Consumer-Facts Expenditure Data and 1995 Micro Vision Lifestyle Variables data sets. More than 100 Claritas variables will also be included.