Key points
- The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Quality Guidelines set the highest quality standards for information products.
- Our products must meet these standards because they can significantly affect health policies.
- While certain restrictions may prevent data availability, NCHS works to ensure that data is available to researchers who need it.
Information use
National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) data and our statistical and analytic information products are used extensively to evaluate and describe the health of the American people.
Findings from our surveys often serve as points of comparison for studying the need to implement or modify health policies. These policies may address health concerns affecting all Americans or specific groups of them.
NCHS recognizes the potential impact some of our data and products may have on health policy and initiatives. That is one reason NCHS requires that these products meet the highest possible quality standards.
To accomplish this goal, NCHS embeds our quality standards in every step of our processes and procedures—from survey concept and design, through sharing of final products.
In addition, qualified individuals conduct independent assessments, like peer reviews, to measure how appropriate and effective these standards are.
Information availability
NCHS strives to ensure that its processes and procedures are appropriate, well documented and replicable. When these are replicable, qualified experts outside of NCHS can follow them and produce results consistent with ours.
Confidentiality restrictions sometimes prevent us from making NCHS datasets, methods, and other procedures publicly available. When this happens, we make every effort to provide qualified researchers limited access to confidential files through our Research Data Center. NCHS established the Research Data Center specifically for this purpose.