Drug overdose deaths are currently the leading cause of injury death in the U.S.
This trend has largely been driven by prescription opioids, such as oxycodone and methadone, and their high rate of misuse among patients. It is estimated that approximately 12.5 million people misused prescription opioids in 2015. While we have abundant data on opioid-related mortality, data on opioid-related hospital visits due to misuse and abuse have been lacking. The need for data on education, prevention, morbidity and mortality related to the use of prescription and non-prescription, legal and illegal opioids is critical to understanding and developing an effective response to this issue. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can help to bridge this knowledge gap with its National Hospital Care Survey (NHCS), conducted by CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
Hospitals are on the front lines of patient care and data collected in hospitals is critical to the conversation. NHCS collects electronic data on patient care in hospital-based settings and describes patterns of health care delivery and utilization in the United States. The survey is based on a nationwide sample of hospitals and collects all data on patients seen in inpatient, outpatient, and emergency departments. Data elements collected include patient demographic information, diagnoses, procedures, medications, laboratory tests and results, and personally identifiable information (PII).
The collection of PII allows NHCS to link a patient’s care history to internal data (e.g., linking encounters across hospital settings as well as linking encounters over time) and external data (e.g., linking patients to the National Death Index). The inclusion of PII uniquely positions the NHCS to study opioid-involved health outcomes and hospital care utilization. Repeat encounters and post-discharge rates for opioid-involved hospital encounters can be analyzed and calculated. Additionally, clinical notes collected via electronic health records may potentially serve as a rich information source on specific drugs involved in the emergency department visit, the nature of misuse or poisoning, and other risk factors for opioid-involved hospital encounters.
Once nationally representative, NHCS will also provide national estimates to inform policies that address health care costs; describe patterns of health care delivery; track the latest health-care concerns; and benchmark hospitals against national data. NHCS can be used to study hospitalizations due to common medical illnesses like asthma, pneumonia, and stroke; injuries, both intentional and accidental; rare medical conditions such as traumatic brain injury; and substance-involved visits to the emergency department.
NCHS is currently recruiting a nationally representative sample of hospitals to participate in NHCS. If you are working at or are affiliated with a hospital that is contacted about participating in NHCS, please urge the hospital to accept. Every hospital’s contribution to this survey will help inform policy decisions and improve healthcare delivery in the U.S.
Benefits for participating hospitals include Meaningful Use Stage 3 credit, continuing education credit, community health benefit, access to hospital data reports, and payment for test and production data.
Questions?
For more information, please visit https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhcs/index.htm to review project materials and publications. For questions please contact Margaret Noonan, Team Lead of the Hospital Care Team, NCHS, at mnoonan2@cdc.gov.
Interested in receiving updates on the release of NHCS data and publications?
Please subscribe to the NHCS-DATA listserv by sending an email to listserv@listserv.cdc.gov and in the body of the email, write: Subscribe NHCS-DATA FIRST NAME LAST NAME (e.g., Subscribe: NHCS-DATA JANE DOE).