NHCS Participants

Your facility has been selected to participate in the National Hospital Care Survey (NHCS), a new survey that entered the field in 2011. The purpose of NHCS is to describe national patterns of health care delivery in hospital-based settings and in freestanding ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs). Patient-level data is collected from hospitals and ASCs, providing national estimates of service use and allowing policy makers and researchers to study relationships between the organization and delivery of health care. NHCS integrates inpatient data collected from the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) and emergency department (ED), outpatient department (OPD), ambulatory surgery location (ASL), and ASC data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS).

The new NHCS will continue to provide nationally representative health care statistics that NHDS and NHAMCS provided but will have some distinct advantages. NHCS collects more information at the hospital level, such as your hospital’s infrastructure for health information technology and volume of care provided by your facility. Also, NHCS allows for the linkage of encounters of care both within the same facility and with outside data sources such as the National Death Index and the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) and Medicaid Statistical Information System (MSIS) datasets, allowing for the measurement of health care quality indicators, such as post-discharge mortality and hospital readmissions. Your hospital may benchmark these indicators against the national statistics.

We look forward to having your facility be a part of the new NHCS!

NHCS Secure Transfer System

Participating hospitals, are you ready to upload your UB-04/837 data? This link will take you straight to our Secure Data Transfer System maintained by Westat, an agent of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).