Anne K. Stratton National Center for Health Statistics Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics Re-engineering the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)

Topics Decade of NHIS technology change NHIS Re-engineering Project Impact of NHIS Re-engineering on user 2004 NHIS Draft Release Plan 2004 NHIS technology plans for NHIS

Decade of NHIS Technology Change 1997 Redesign  Questionnaire redesign – content & structure  Conversion from paper questionnaire to CAPI (computer assisted personal interview)  New post production systems  New data dissemination products – Internet and CD-ROM

Decade of NHIS Technology Change Consequences of adopting new technology for 1 st time  Timeliness issues – 2 year backlog of production work  Efficiency issues – manual, redundant systems  Quality Issues – extensive clean- up/reformatting of data Ernst & Young - Evaluation of NHIS Redesign

NHIS Re-engineering Project Partnership with Census Bureau Components of Re-engineering  CAPI Software conversion – DOS to Windows University of Michigan partnered on screen design issues  Databases for specifications and analysis  New post production systems

NHIS Re-engineering Project Schedule  2001 – Work began  2003 – Pretest  2004 – January: data collection began  2005 – July release expected NHIS production concurrent with Re-engineering

Impact of NHIS Re-engineering on the User Improve timeliness of micro data release: 6 months after data collection ends for most files Better documentation Reduce editing and recodes Reduce redundancy between files

2004 NHIS Draft Release Plan July 2005 – partial release October 2005 – complete release  Health Insurance – coded component  Maybe other files ???  Internet only

Future Technology Plans for NHIS Continuous Improvement  Re-engineering provides foundation we will build upon Analytic tools for the user  SQL Server relational database technology  Data warehouses and data marts for specific analytic needs Historical NHIS Files on the Internet – prior to 1997

Provide feedback on National Health Interview Survey data product to the NHIS Listserve