National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey

The National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) has been conducted annually since 1992. The purpose of NHAMCS is to meet the needs and demands for statistical information about the provision of ambulatory medical care services in the United States. Ambulatory services are rendered in a wide variety of settings, including physicians' offices and hospital outpatient and emergency departments. The target of the NHAMCS to date has been in-person visits made to outpatient departments (OPDs) and emergency departments (EDs) of non-Federal, short stay hospitals (hospitals with an average length of stay of less than 30 days) or those whose specialty is general (medical or surgical) or children's general. This revision is to transfer data gathering from the previously conducted National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery (NSAS) (OMB No. 0920-0334) to NHAMCS. After the 1994-1996 NSAS, funds were not available to gather this important, and much sought after, data until 2006. Due to a lack of funds it has not been possible to conduct an independent NSAS since that time and so, for 2009, NCHS proposes to begin the expansion of NHAMCS data gathering to include hospital-based ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs). Beginning in 2010, NCHS plans to seek OMB approval to expand NHAMCS to also include free-standing ASCs. The objective of this new collection will be to collect data about ambulatory surgery centers, the patients they serve, and the services they deliver. It will remain the principal source of data on ambulatory surgery center services in the United States. It has been the benchmark against which special programmatic data sources are compared. NHAMCS ASC data that will be collected include patient characteristics, diagnoses, surgical and nonsurgical procedures, provider and type of anesthesia, time in and out of surgery and postoperative care, and discharge disposition.