Assessing National Hospital Care Survey and National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey Data: A Comparison of Opioid and Respiratory Disease Encounters

• Activity Number: 267 - Using Multiple Sources of Data to Assess and Improve Data Quality
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 : 1:00 PM to 2:50 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Geoffrey Jackson* and Carol DeFrances and Jill Ashman
• Companies: National Center for Health Statistics and National Center for Health Statistics and National Center for Health Statistics
• Keywords: Hospital utilization; Survey Design; Electronic Health Records; Opioid-use

Abstract

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.