Lincoln, Neb. National Research Corporation (NRC) is pleased to announce the release of the 2007/08 Healthcare Market Guide.  This annual study is the nation's most comprehensive consumer assessment of the health care industry.  Every year, NRC collects data from over 200,000 households representing 450,000 covered lives.  The assessment is then made available to hospitals and health plans nationwide through the Healthcare Market Guide.

Healthcare Market Guide Director Tracy Castro explained that the data results allow hospitals to track changes in their organization and the impact on consumer and patient perceptions.  The assessment can be purchased with three years or more of data allowing hospitals to not only see their market performance this year, but also in years past, Castro said.  That feature allows hospitals to trend and track changes in their market over time.  They can see how theyve improved and how their competitors have improved.  They can also use the data to gauge the impact of new facilities that have opened and the study can help clients see the effect that this has on their hospital and all providers as a whole.

The Healthcare Market Guide is the largest annual study of its kind and provides hospitals with specific data on image and preference ratings, patient satisfaction, quality of care, last-visit share, product line preferences, household healthcare utilization patterns, and advertising recall to name a few.  Health plans benefit from benchmark data on satisfaction with access, client service and administrative issues, physician performance, medical care received, and a host of other measures.  All total, the Healthcare Market Guide can provide name-specific consumer ratings for more than 3,200 hospitals and more than 800 health plans nationwide.  To allow meaningful comparison, local, state and national benchmarks are all provided.

The Healthcare Market Guide is delivered to clients in an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, PC workstation format.  Data for the assessment is gathered through an internet-based questionnaire sent to the primary healthcare decision maker.  Given the size of the survey, the margin of error is plus or minus 0.2 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.

NRC (NASDAQ:NRCI) in an industry leader, with more than two decades of experience in healthcare performance measurement and improvement.