The National Hospital Care Survey is tracking the latest trends affecting hospitals and health care organizations. It’s also tracking factors that influence

• Use of health care resources
• Quality of health care
• Disparities in health care services provided to population subgroups in the U.S.

The National Center for Health Statistics tapped Westat to conduct the survey.

• Westat recruited approximately 150 hospitals to participate.
• Participating hospitals provide data on all inpatient encounters, as well as all patient visits to emergency departments and all other outpatient units.
• Hospitals can provide data in the form of patient claims or from an excerpt of their electronic health record (EHR)system.
• Claims and EHR data are sent to Westat via its secure transfer site or through the survey’s Health Information Service Provider (HISP), a secure email that hospitals use to send patient data.
• Westat developed a highly scalable system to test, validate, and extract data from HL7 Continuity of Care documents.
• Natural language processing has been used to combine provider mentions for a subset of the 35,500,000 payer names collected.

• More than 81 million records were processed.
• Data gathered will help provide accurate and reliable health care statistics that answer key questions of interest to health care and public health professionals, researchers, and health care policymakers.
• These data will contribute to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Emergency Department Surveillance System (SEDSS).
• Data will provide statistics on the nation’s opioid epidemic as well as other prescription and illicit drug use and abuse.