National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)

×

We'd Love Your Feedback!

Thank you for visiting our website! We value your feedback and use it to continually improve our services. Yale affiliates will find a link to our suggestion box included in their form.

Link for Yale Affiliates Link for Non-Yale Affiliates

Forms will open in a new tab

Updated: October 23^th, 2025

Overview

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is the nation’s principal health statistics agency. It collects and disseminates data to provide a comprehensive understanding of health and healthcare in the United States. NCHS gathers information from various sources, including birth and death records, medical records, interviews, physical examinations, and laboratory testing ^1–3.

Policymakers and public health professionals use NCHS data to identify health problems and develop policies and programs. The data is shared through reports, dashboards, and data files, measuring the health of the U.S. population, monitoring health trends, identifying disparities, documenting healthcare access and usage, supporting research, and guiding public policies and programs ¹.

Gaining Access

The program manages six crucial datasets for public health, each with its own information page detailing the programs and data offerings ^2,3. You can find more about how to gain access to these program data on their respective pages from the Dataset main page. They are:

• Family Growth Survey: Provides data on family life, marriage and divorce, pregnancy, infertility, use of contraception, and men’s and women’s health.

• Health Care Surveys: Collects information on the usage and quality of health care services, including hospital visits, outpatient and emergency department visits, and long-term care.

• Rapid Surveys: Gathers timely data on emerging public health issues, allowing for rapid response and policy adjustments.

• Health and Nutrition Examination Survey: Combines interviews and physical examinations to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States.

• Health Interview Survey: Collects data on a broad range of health topics through personal interviews, providing insights into health status, health care access, and progress toward national health objectives.

• Vital Statistics: Includes data on births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, providing essential information for understanding population health trends and outcomes.

Valuable Links

• National Center for Health Statistics: Find a comprehensive listing of all the data offerings provided by NCHS ³.

Publications

This section presents a selection of PubMed articles that utilize the dataset and are authored by individuals affiliated with the Yale School of Public Health. These articles are provided to inspire researchers and students to use the data in their own work.

• Mortality Among Persons Entering HIV Care Compared With the General U.S. Population : An Observational Study.
  Jessie K Edwards, Stephen R Cole, Tiffany L Breger, Jacqueline E Rudolph, Lindsey M Filiatreau, Kate Buchacz, Elizabeth Humes, Peter F Rebeiro, Gypsyamber D’Souza, M John Gill, Michael J Silverberg, W Christopher Mathews, Michael A Horberg, Jennifer Thorne, H Irene Hall, Amy Justice, Vincent C Marconi, Viviane D Lima, Ronald J Bosch, Timothy R Sterling, Keri N Althoff, Richard D Moore, Michael Saag, Joseph J Eron
  Annals of internal medicine 2021 Jul 6 doi: 10.7326/M21-0065
  PMID: 34224262
• All-Cause Mortality and Life Expectancy by Birth Cohort Across US States.
  Theodore R Holford, Lisa McKay, Jamie Tam, Jihyoun Jeon, Rafael Meza
  JAMA network open 2025 Apr 1 doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.7695
  PMID: 40293748
• Disparities in Prenatal Care Utilization in the United States.
  Pearl A McElfish, Aaron R Caldwell, James P Selig, Donya Watson, Jonathan Langner, Jennifer Callaghan-Koru, Austin Porter, Don E Willis, Jennifer A Andersen, Nicola L Hawley, Philmar Mendoza-Kabua, Clare C Brown
  Maternal and child health journal 2025 Sep 23 doi: 10.1007/s10995-025-04150-2
  PMID: 40986172
• Evaluating the reliability of mobility metrics from aggregated mobile phone data as proxies for SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the USA: a population-based study.
  Nishant Kishore, Aimee R Taylor, Pierre E Jacob, Navin Vembar, Ted Cohen, Caroline O Buckee, Nicolas A Menzies
  The Lancet. Digital health 2021 Nov 2 doi: 10.1016/S2589-7500(21)00214-4
  PMID: 34740555
• Floods and cause-specific mortality in the United States applying a triply robust approach.
  Lingzhi Chu, Joshua L Warren, Erica S Spatz, Sarah Lowe, Yuan Lu, Xiaomei Ma, Joseph S Ross, Harlan M Krumholz, Kai Chen
  Nature communications 2025 Mar 23 doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-58236-0
  PMID: 40122917
• Changes in pneumococcal deaths in the USA following the COVID-19 pandemic.
  Lianhan Shang, Stephanie Perniciaro, Daniel M Weinberger
  International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases 2025 Aug 29 doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2025.108020
  PMID: 40886796

References

1.

CDC. About NCHS. National center for health statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/index.html (2025).

2.

CDC. Data and analysis tools. National center for health statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-analysis-tools/index.html (2025).

3.

CDC. National center for health statistics. National center for health statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/index.html (2025).