Health Services Research Information Central (HSRIC) Has A New Look!

The Web portal for the health services research community, HSR Information Central has been redesigned. Created in 2005, the Web site was established by the National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR) to serve as the focal point for identification and retrieval of important publications and Web materials of interest to the broad and diverse community of health services researchers and policy makers.

HSRIC is a Web portal that provides access to curated and up-to-date general and specialized research resources, including Internet links to data, funding announcements, reports, podcasts and discussion groups. The new design highlights the site’s specialized sets of resources on such important topics as Health Care Reform, Comparative Effectiveness Research, and Public Health Services and Systems Research, which provide users information and links to both domestic and international sources, selected for their quality, authority of authorship, uniqueness and appropriateness. HSRIC also provides easy access to the National Library of Medicine databases HSRProj (Health Services Research Projects in Progress) that are funded but not yet published and HSRR (Health Services/Sciences Research Resources) that are high-value HSR datasets and assessment tools and research that cites them (tailored PubMed queries). HSRIC is broad yet highly selective in its scope: it is not just an index of all health services resources on the Web.

The new look of HSRIC is crisp, fresh and easy-to-navigate. The updated homepage features a number of changes that include new graphics, better layout and more space to highlight stories important to the field of health services research. In addition to the changes focused on the homepage, the HSRIC site has a new logo, intended to suggest the site’s mission of bringing coherence to diverse sources and tools for HSR (see Figure 1). Use of color to highlight the left-hand navigation bar on the internal pages gives the entire site a uniform look.

Content on the site has also been enhanced with the addition of two new specially-curated HSR Topics resource pages: Aging Population Issues and Dissemination and Implementation Science. The site also has its own search engine, powered by Vivisimo, enabling visitors to the site to conduct searches easily. Vivisimo ranks the results by relevancy. Once a search has been conducted, the remix button enables you to see different clustered groups related to your search. Each time 'remix' is clicked, new patterns will appear from the most frequent words in the top 200 results (see Figure 2).

We invite suggestions for links to government and non-profit organizations that serve as gateways to information on a variety of topics related to health services research. When suggesting a new link for HSR Information Central to another site, please consider that site's enduring value and the frequency with which it is updated. To submit a link for consideration, please use the Suggestions link in the navigation links (see Figure 3) or visit //www.nlm.nih.gov/hsrinfo/hsrsuggestlink.html and follow the instructions.

If you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact NICHSR staff at: nichsr@nlm.nih.gov. We look forward to receiving your input.