Shaping public policy from the perspective of a data builder.

During the past six decades, data analysis and research studies have been instrumental in shaping public and private health care policy. Policymakers obtain the knowledge they need for making policy decisions through exposure to and examination of data generated through research studies, experimentation, demonstrations, and analyses. In this article, U.S. hospital care policy has been divided into phases. As the development of health care policy has progressed in each phase, decisionmakers have consistently increased their reliance on data.