michigan informatics

National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), provides access to micro-data, tabulated state data, and current developments relating to many public health topics.

The NCHS web site includes:

Health, United States: an annual report on trends in health statistics.  The report consists of two main sections: A chartbook containing text and figures that illustrates major trends in the health of Americans; and a trend tables section that contains 153 detailed data tables.

Faststats A to Z: a good place to begin your search for statistics. It is an alphabetical listing of public health-related issues, diseases, and topics. The easy-to-navigate headings link to quick statistics, additional data, and related information and organizations.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES): links to survey results and products, survey content, data sets and other documentation, and related links. Many of the survey tools and results are available in pdf format and the data sets may be downloaded as SAS code.

The National Health Care Survey (NHCS) embraces a family of health care provider surveys, obtaining information about the facilities that supply health care, the services rendered, and the characteristics of the patients served. The following eight surveys are under the umbrella of the NHCS.

• The National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) is an annual survey of visits made to nonfederally employed office-based physicians providing (primarily) patient care, excluding three specialties--radiology, pathology, and anesthesiology.
• The National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) supplies key information about patient visits to hospital emergency and outpatient departments (EDs and OPDs
• The National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery (NSAS) was designed to provide national estimates about the use of ambulatory surgery services (places where surgical and nonsurgical procedures are performed on an outpatient basis).
• The National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) is an annual facility-based survey of about 500 hospitals and 270,000 patient records. Reportable items include patient demographics, medical diagnoses and procedures, expected sources of payment, length of stay, and discharge information.
• The National Nursing Home Survey (NNHS) provides demographic and health-related information about the resident and discharged nursing home population and information about staff and facility characteristics
• The National Home and Hospice Care Survey (NHHCS), a national probability sample survey of home health and hospice care agencies including information on medical practice and administrative functions.
• The National Employer Health Insurance Survey (NEHIS) is a federally-sponsored survey designed to produce State estimates of employer-sponsored health insurance spending, baseline data for insurance system trends, and data for analysis of health care reform.
• The National Health Provider Inventory (NHPI) contains a comprehensive national listing of health care facilities, including nursing homes, home health agencies, hospices, and licensed residential care facilities.

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is the principal source of information on the health of the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States. The main objective of the NHIS is to monitor the health of the United States population through the collection and analysis of data on a broad range of health topics.

The National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) is the structure through which the NCHS collects and disseminates the Nation's official vital statistics. The Vital Statistics of the United States and the National Vital Statistics Reports are published in electronic form. Standard forms and model procedures for uniform registration of the events are available for review and use. NCHS also makes available electronic micro-data files on CD-ROM containing individual vital-event records.

Under the umbrella of the NVSS are sites with information on more specific areas:

• Birth Data contains tabulated state data, new report releases, news releases and fact sheets, data highlights, statistical tables of births, methods, public use data files documentation, and micro-data files, errata, and links to related sites. Most information is available in PDF format.
• Mortality Data contains news releases and fact sheets, data highlights, methods, publications, tabulated data , micro-data, international activities, and links to related sites. Most information is available in PDF format.
• Marriages and Divorces includes detailed state tables, and links to other sources of marriage and divorce statistics including The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Fetal Death Data includes data highlights including infant, fetal, and perinatal mortality rates, methods and coding of fetal cause of death, publications, micro-data and downloadable public use data files as PDFs, and links to related sites.