What are the National Health Care Surveys?

The National Health Care Surveys are designed to answer key questions of interest to health care policy makers, public health professionals, and researchers. These can include the factors that influence the use of health care resources, the quality of health care, including safety, and disparities in health care services provided to population subgroups in the United States.

Collectively, our surveys have a combination of design features that make them unique. The surveys are nationally representative, provider-based, and cover a broad spectrum of health care settings. Within each setting, data are collected from a sample of organizations that provide care (such as home health care agencies, inpatient hospital units, or physician offices) and from samples of patient (or discharge) encounters within the sampled organizations.

Each one of the National Health Care Surveys collects core information which remains stable over time. Consequently, trends in the  types of care delivered in each setting can be monitored in an objective and reliable manner and can be examined in relation to characteristics of providers, patients, and clinical management of patients' care. In addition, the surveys are flexible enough to accommodate special data collection modules and to sample new provider organizations as new information is needed.

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Data and Reports by Health Care Setting

National Center for Health Statistics
3311 Toledo Road
Hyattsville, MD 20782
Phone:
1-800-232-4636
nchsquery@cdc.gov

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Rd, Atlanta, GA 30333, U.S.A
Tel: (404) 639-3311 / Public Inquiries: (404) 639-3534 / (800) 311-3435