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Abstract:
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To study the impact of the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic on hospitals in the United States, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) used data collected by the National Hospital Care Survey (NHCS) to create an interactive, online dashboard to display timely preliminary estimates. The NHCS is an annual, administrative data collection of a year of inpatient and emergency department encounter-level data designed to produce national estimates on hospital utilization. The survey was not designed to produce mid-data collection estimates; however, NCHS developed new procedures to receive early release 2020 data from approximately 50 selected hospitals. The early release hospital data were used to create dashboards displaying COVID-19 comorbidities, the average length of hospital stay for intubated or ventilator patients, and in-hospital mortality. The ability of the early release data to produce timely COVID-19 statistics shows the survey’s ability to provide near real-time results with the quality of a national survey. This presentation will provide an overview of the process to adapt the survey to produce timely results for the COVID-19 dashboards.
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