This guide will help you perform environmental scans for your health care sector using both library resources and freely available web sources.
Start here: the resources in this section are designed as market scans of the industry.
Healthcare Sectors Industry Analysis is an industry report from the Mergent database that provides an overall view of the health care market, for both the US and Canada. Great overall background information. Link goes directly to a PDF page (no searching required).
Mintel provides industry reports for various subareas within the health care field; not every possible subarea is covered.
To log in and view these reports:Journal articles may do an environmental scan of your sector and/or provide statistics to help support your case.
Medline - this database searches through the biomedical literature, so some of it will be more focused on the medical aspects than the financial side. However, using the following tips you should find information on the finances of your sector.
For more information on searching MEDLINE, follow this tutorial.
International Journal of Health Care Finance & Economics is a full text journal devoted to health care finance.You can browse through the issue or you can search within the journal for your topic.
Try these next: While not designed specifically as market scans, these sources provide statistics that give you a picture of the sector and allow you to evaluate opportunities for growth.