Abstract
The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced a new director for its Division of Vital Statistics, which manages the National Vital Statistics System. NCHS has implemented a series of linkages that connect NCHS data systems to other federal administrative data sources and expand the analytical potential of the data produced by NCHS. NCHS’s National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is being redesigned to better meet users’ needs. NCHS ends its long-running department, NCHS Dataline.
Steven Schwartz to Head National Vital Statistics System
NCHS appointed Steven P. Schwartz, PhD, as director of the Division of Vital Statistics. Schwartz has more than 30 years of leadership experience in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where he served as assistant commissioner for environmental health services, director of epidemiology and evaluation research, and, most recently, as the registrar of vital records and assistant commissioner for vital statistics. Schwartz is credited with transforming New York City’s vital records and statistics systems into one of the most innovative, high-functioning vital statistics organizations in the United States. While at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, he planned, developed, and managed programs to reimagine and automate the registration, processing, and digitizing of vital records.
Schwartz is a leader in modernizing vital registration and statistics nationwide. He was a past president of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS), which is the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials affiliate for statistics and information systems, and received its highest award for national leadership for vital and health statistics. Schwartz also chaired the Good-to-Great Committee, in collaboration with NCHS and NAPHSIS, to improve vital statistics throughout the United States by leading the effort to increase timeliness and data quality in every vital records jurisdiction. This work was highly successful and re-energized vital statistics throughout the nation. In his new role in the Division of Vital Statistics, Schwartz is focusing on improving vital statistics by providing real-time health surveillance capabilities to monitor the opioid crisis and other emerging health issues.
NCHS Data Linkage Program
NCHS developed an initiative to enhance the analytical potential of its surveys by linking records from those data systems with administrative records from federal sources. NCHS surveys provide extensive cross-sectional data, but most surveys do not have the longitudinal capacity to track the impact of various characteristics and behaviors on health status and health care use. Linking survey data with administrative data also provides the opportunity to study changes in health status, health care use, and expenditures in specialized populations, such as people who are elderly and disabled. In the data linkage program, NCHS population health survey data files have been linked with data from the National Death Index, Medicare enrollment and claims, and the Social Security Administration for multiple projects.
One example of data linking is linking data from NHIS and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey with administrative data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The purpose of this project is to associate data on health outcomes from the surveys with data on HUD housing rental assistance programs to evaluate the association between health outcomes and receipt of federal-assisted housing. Additionally, data from the National Hospital Care Survey were linked to the National Death Index with funding from the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Secretary’s Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund. This linkage enables researchers to calculate posthospital discharge mortality estimates and determine causes of death. The NCHS-linked files are available through the NCHS Research Data Center. 1
Redesign of the NHIS
The NHIS is a large-scale, general-purpose survey that collects data on the health of the civilian, noninstitutionalized population through household interviews conducted with a nationwide sample. NCHS has conducted the survey since 1957, and it has been redesigned periodically to improve the survey content and operations. Testing of the new design—the first major redesign since the survey began in 1957—is underway. The goals of the redesign are to improve the measurement of covered health topics, shorten the length of the questionnaire, harmonize overlapping content with other federal health surveys, establish a long-term structure of ongoing and periodic topics, and incorporate advances in survey methodology and measurement.
During the past several years, NCHS canvassed the research community and data users broadly for input on changing and emerging data needs to determine survey content for the redesigned NHIS. Detailed outlines of the core topics and the adult and child sample questionnaires have been drafted and appear on the survey website. 2 NCHS is testing the new questionnaire structure and content this year and will launch the full redesign in 2019.
NCHS Data Resources
This installment of NCHS Dataline will be the last to appear in Public Health Reports. However, information presented in this department will continue to be available on the NCHS website (www.cdc.gov/nchs). On the website, NCHS provides access to all NCHS publications, indexed in publication series and by topic; listings and descriptions of all public-use data files; guides to NCHS data by subject matter through FastStats (www.cdc.gov/nchs/faststats/default.htm); and an archive of the weekly NCHS QuickStats, which appears in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The NCHS website also has descriptions of the NCHS data systems, guides to acquiring and using NCHS data, and tutorials for various data sets. Interactive and dynamic data files offer users the opportunity to create customized data sets and tabulations.