Abstract:
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Hospital adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems and collection of standardized UB-04 billing data have provided the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) with new opportunities to collect hospital utilization data with more clinical depth and greater volume at reduced cost. NCHS developed the National Hospital Care Survey (NHCS), which collects all EHR or UB-04 inpatient and emergency department (ED) encounters electronically from sampled hospitals. Hospital recruitment has been difficult, so national estimates have not been produced from NHCS data, despite the large volume of encounters collected. NCHS also conducts the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), which provides national estimates of ED utilization through abstraction of medical records at sampled hospitals. NHAMCS has been successful in capturing high quality data through this method but on-site abstraction is becoming increasingly more expensive. This presentation compares unweighted NHCS data to national estimates of NHAMCS visits for opioid use and respiratory disease and highlights their similarities, despite survey design differences and the non-representativeness of NHCS.
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