Adapting COVID-19 Early Release Data to Determine Impact of Opioid Use in Hospital Emergency Departments

• Activity Number: 294 - SPEED: Statistics in Social Sciences and Survey Research Part 2
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 9, 2022 : 10:30 AM to 11:15 AM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Salah Shaikh*
• Companies: National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) - CDC
• Keywords: Hospital Data; Opioid; Administrative data; COVID-19

Abstract

The opioid epidemic has continued throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic. Hospital emergency departments are often on the front lines of treating patients with opioid-involved events, and hospital resources have become increasingly strained during the pandemic. The National Center for Health Statistics studies hospital utilization using the National Hospital Care Survey (NHCS), an annual, administrative data collection of emergency department (ED) encounter-level data. To meet the need for timely hospital data, procedures were developed to utilize preliminary data collected from ~50 NHCS hospitals to report on COVID-19 care. The data are unweighted and are not nationally representative. The data were originally used to produce estimates for an online COVID-19 dashboard; however, these data were also able to report on the 385,645 opioid-involved ED visits during the same period. This shows NHCS’s ability to provide near real-time results on opioid-involved visits with the quality of a national survey. This presentation will provide an overview of the process to produce these timely descriptive statistics from NHCS to examine opioid use in ED departments during the COVID-19 Pandemic.