There are two ways to look up rates of resources and utilization for the areas of your choice. You can either select the relevant data table from our Download page or use one of the Data Tools to create a graphic display of information accompanied by an abbreviated data table.

For example, if you are interested in rates of coronary artery bypass surgery in a specific hospital referral region, you could choose the "selected surgical discharge rates" table for the data year of interest (the most recent available data year is listed first). This Excel table will provide rates of a number of common procedures; scroll across the table to find the column heading for the procedure you are interested in and then scroll down the page to the hospital referral region name in the HRR Name column. Often it is of interest to compare HRRs within a state; you can also scroll through the HRR list to find the rate in an HRR in any other state (if, for example, you wished to compare the rate of bypass surgery in Detroit to the rate in Cleveland).

If you scroll down the data table to the last row, you can find the U.S. average rate for each of the surgical procedures listed in the table; this, again, is often a good reference point when you are trying to determine whether the rate in the area of interest is very different from the national average, or near it. A similar Excel table is available for states.

The Data Tools are provided to give you a way to take a quick look at how the rate or rates in the HRR or HRRs you select compare to rates in other HRRs, and to the highest and lowest rates in the United States. For example, if you use the distribution graph tool and request a graph of the distribution of rates of surgery for low back pain in the state of Wisconsin, the display will show a graph that plots one point for each of the HRRs in the state (red points) and compares those rates to the distribution of rates in the United States as a whole (blue points). The graph was designed to give a quick visual representation of several aspects of variation. The first is, how different is the rate in the selected HRR from other rates? A rate that appeared as a red dot near the center of the distribution, where most of the points on the graph are clustered, would indicate that the rate in the selected HRR was not very different from the national or state average. A rate that was represented by a dot at the very top or bottom of the graph would indicate that the rate was either somewhat different from the rest of the rates in the U.S., or very different (if, for example, most of the data points were clustered around 3.0 procedures per 1,000, and the rate in the area you selected was represented by a dot at 6.0 procedures, that would indicate that the rate was about twice as high as the rates in the HRRs near the center of the distribution).

Complete instructions for using each tool are available on the Help page.