Online Program

Demonstration of the National Hospital Care Survey: Inpatient and Emergency Department Encounters for Congestive Heart Failure, 2016 (308142)

Keywords: heart failure, health care, data linkage, national death index

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a common health condition, affecting an estimated 5.7 million people annually, in which the heart is unable to pump enough blood to meet the body’s demand. The National Hospital Care Survey (NHCS), conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, provides a unique opportunity to study hospital care and mortality for CHF patients through an examination of their comorbidities and healthcare utilization in various hospital settings.

NHCS gathers inpatient and emergency department (ED) data from a sample of U.S. hospitals. The survey collects demographics; diagnoses and procedures; and patient identifiers (e.g., name and social security number) related to the hospital visit. Collection of patient identifiers makes it possible to link patients across hospital settings and to outside data sources such as the National Death Index (NDI). In the 2016 NHCS, 145 hospitals submitted inpatient data and 124 submitted ED data, comprising a large dataset of about 2.6 million inpatient and 7 million ED encounters. NHCS data are not nationally representative but can be used for exploratory analysis on hospital care.

This presentation will illustrate the analytic capabilities of NHCS through a study of hospital encounters for CHF in the 2016 NHCS, which contains 197,574 inpatient and 172,768 ED encounters with an any-listed diagnosis of CHF. Specifically, this study will examine the number of CHF patients who were admitted as inpatients from the ED; the number of hospitalizations per CHF patient; and in-hospital and post-acute mortality of CHF patients using the linked NDI data. Additionally, the presentation will investigate the presence of comorbidities (e.g., diabetes and hypertension) in CHF patients.

Although not yet nationally representative, NHCS data illustrate the robust analytic capabilities of the survey to study common health conditions and provide insight on hospital care for patients.