[Learning from regional differences: online platform: http://www.versorgungsatlas.de].
In 2011, the Central Research Institute of Ambulatory Health Care in Germany (ZI) published the website http://www.versorgungsatlas.de, a portal that presents research results from regional health services in Germany. The Web portal provides a publicly accessible source of information and a growing number of selected analyses focusing on regional variation in health care. Each topic is presented in terms of interactive maps, tables, and diagrams and is supplemented by a paper that examines the results in detail and provides an explanation of the findings. The portal has been designed to provide a forum on which health service researchers can publish their results derived from various data sources of different institutions in Germany and can comment on results already available on http://www.versorgungsatlas.de. For health policy actors, the discussion of regional differences offers a new, previously unavailable basis for determining the region-specific treatment needs and for providing health-care management with the goal of high-quality care for each resident.
Kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung, Herbert-Lewin-Platz 2, 10623, Berlin, Deutschland, smangiapane@kbv.de.
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D003153:Community Health Services / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005858:Germany; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D017062:Small-Area Analysis; D014584:User-Computer Interface