Summary
The National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) was inaugurated in 1992 to fill a gap in data about ambulatory medical care in the United States. Although the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) collects annual data on patient visits to physician offices, it excludes the hospital emergency room and outpatient department visits that make up a large part of the total ambulatory care received each year. The 1994 NHAMCS provides data from samples of patient records selected from emergency departments (EDs) and outpatient departments (OPDs) of a national sample of hospitals. The resulting national estimates describe the use of hospital ambulatory medical care services in the United States. For the 1994 survey, data were collected from 260 OPDs and 418 EDs. Among the variables included are age, race, and sex of the patient, reason for the visit, physician's diagnoses, cause of injury (ED only), surgical procedures (OPD only), medication therapy, and expected source of payment.
Citation
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Subject Terms
Geographic Coverage
Restrictions
In preparing the data file(s) for this collection, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has removed direct identifiers and characteristics that might lead to identification of data subjects. As an additional precaution, NCHS requires, under Section 308(d) of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 242m), that data collected by NCHS not be used for any purpose other than statistical analysis and reporting. NCHS further requires that analysts not use the data to learn the identity of any persons or establishments and that the director of NCHS be notified if any identities are inadvertently discovered. ICPSR member institutions and other users ordering data from ICPSR are expected to adhere to these restrictions.
Sample
The NHAMCS used a four-stage probability design with samples of PSUs, hospitals within PSUs, clinics within hospitals, and patient visits within clinics.
Universe
Visits to the emergency and outpatient departments of noninstitutional general and short-stay hospitals within the 50 states and the District of Columbia that had an average length of stay of less than 30 days, or hospitals whose specialty was general (medical or surgical) or children's general. Excluded were federal hospitals, hospital units within institutions, and hospitals with less than six beds staffed for patient use.
Data Source
patient visit records from hospital emergency departments and outpatient departments
administrative records data
Original Release Date
1996-12-19
Version Date
2006-01-12
Version History
1997-05-16 Corrections were made to the data for Part 2, Outpatient Department Data, so that the "year of visit" variable accurately reflects the year.
2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 3 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.
Notes
The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.
This study is maintained and distributed by the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), the aging program within ICPSR. NACDA is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Heath (NIH).