What to know
- Search for drugs mentioned in the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) and National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS).
- Find information about these drugs' characteristics, including therapeutic class, composition, prescription, and control status.
- The system provides data on frequencies of drug mentions in NAMCS and NHAMCS data in 2015.
Purpose
The Ambulatory Care Drug Database System facilitates the identification of drug codes used in National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) and National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) data. These codes can then be used in the analysis of survey data.
The query system is NOT intended to provide quick estimates of drug use. Estimates shown in the database may not be statistically reliable because the same drug can appear in the database under different names. Unless researchers take into account all possible names, estimates may be based on incomplete information.
The National Center for Health Statistics provides these estimates to help researchers assess the relative frequency of the drug’s occurrence. This assessment can be important in deciding the feasibility of further study of that drug's use. The provided estimates also can help data users verify that they are getting correct results when analyzing the data.
Get assistance
Search the data
You can search for drugs in the database by—
- Drug names as written in the medical record
- This may have been written as the trade name, generic name, or desired therapeutic effect such as “allergy relief.”
- Only results with the exact name searched will be returned.
- This may have been written as the trade name, generic name, or desired therapeutic effect such as “allergy relief.”
- Generic-equivalent names
- Ingredients
Example
If you search “Lasix” as a drug name, the query will return information on mentions of "Lasix" at visits to office-based physicians and hospital emergency departments in 2015.
Some physicians or hospital staff may have recorded this drug as “Furosemide” (the generic name for Lasix). Searching for "Lasix" as the drug name won't return these mentions. Searching for "Furosemide" as the drug name won't return the records that use "Lasix" as the drug name.
To return both groups of records for a more complete picture of visits involving use of this drug, you can search "Furosemide" as the generic name. The results would include all occurrences of the drug, whether they had been entered using either name.