NCHS Recruits for New National Hospital Care Survey

An essential component for improving health care in America is the availability of comprehensive, integrated information on patterns of health care utilization across many settings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has taken an important step in enhancing the quality and scope of hospital statistics by launching the National Hospital Care Survey (NHCS), an effort that will be implemented over several years.

Since 1965, NCHS has monitored the nation’s utilization of hospital inpatient care through the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) and, since 1992, utilization of ambulatory care at hospitals through the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS). These two surveys were conducted annually to meet the need for information on hospitalizations, as well as visits to emergency (ED) and outpatient (OPD) departments and ambulatory surgery centers (ASC). The NHCS combines these two surveys to broaden the reach and scope of health care research, including making linkages between and across clinical, administrative, and demographic data.

In the spring of 2011, NCHS began recruiting a sample of 500 hospitals for the NHCS. In 2011 and 2012, participating hospitals are being asked to electronically transmit their Uniform Bill (UB)-04 administrative claims for all hospital discharges. In 2013, in addition to the inpatient component, the data collection will expand to ambulatory care by including visits to hospital EDs, OPDs, ambulatory center locations, and free-standing ASCs.

The NHCS will provide a unique opportunity to examine encounters of care across inpatient, ED, OPD, and ASC settings. It will be possible to link data from NHCS to the National Death Index to measure post-discharge mortality as well as to Medicare and Medicaid data to get a more complete picture of the care patients are receiving. Moreover, hospitals may be asked to participate in special studies that address specific research and policy questions.

NCHS is moving toward electronic collection of all health care data, beginning with the electronic transmission of the UB-04 claims data for all hospital inpatients for this new survey. As hospitals adopt electronic health records (EHRs), NCHS will be poised to accept electronic files from hospital medical records for all components of the new survey. These changes will greatly enrich the hospital data available to researchers and policy makers across the United States.

The NHCS will continue to provide national health care statistics on the utilization of inpatient care and ambulatory care. This new survey will help paint a clearer picture of today’s health care environment and address a broad range of policy and research questions.

For more information about the NHCS visit www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhcs.htm. In addition, hospital staff who are Health Information Management (HIM) professionals are eligible to earn Continuing Education Units after completion of an on-line module about the survey, visit http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhcs/continuing_education.htm.