Secondary data (SD) in health care includes published industry reports on quality benchmarks. These include number of incidents per organization, averages in a specific region, and severity of incidents per organization. SD also includes industry best practices, quality measures, health care organization rankings, and accreditation marks.

Data are published by several accrediting and licensing organizations such as the American Health Quality Association (AHQA), The Joint Commission, and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) via the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The students should discuss how data from such agencies and other secondary data such as demographic and health care indicators can help the organization set benchmarks to compare themselves against their peers.

Students should also discuss how analyzing internal data against secondary data can help the organization improve quality by ranking their organization and developing best practices from the top industry performers