The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is pleased to announce the release of a new report, entitled “Office-based Medical Practices: Methods and Estimates from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey”. The report provides descriptive statistics about office-based medical practices in 2003-04, and explains the methods by which researchers may weight data from individual physicians to produce estimates about medical practices. Report highlights include the observation that two-thirds of all medical practices consist of solo practitioners, but only one-third of office-based physicians practice by themselves. Similarly, the one-fifth of office practices having three or more physicians contains more than one-half of all office-based physicians. For decisions that are made at the practice level, these distinctions are important. For example, in 2003-04, 19 percent of physicians used electronic medical records, but only 15 percent of medical practices used them. The report may be accessed at: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad383.pdf.
The data upon which this report is based are available to the public as part of the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS). NAMCS collects data from a national probability sample of office-based physicians. Data are collected about the physicians, their patients, and the services they deliver. The sample excludes federally employed physicians, those who specialize in anesthesiology, radiology, or pathology, and physicians who do not see patients in an office. NAMCS public use data files are available for the years 1973-1981, 1985, and 1989-2004 at: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/ahcd/ahcd1.htm#Micro-data.
NAMCS is part of a larger group of surveys known collectively as the National Health Care Surveys. Each survey collects data on health care providers and provider organizations, the patients they serve, and the services delivered. For information on surveys of long term care, inpatient care, and ambulatory surgery, please visit www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhcs.htm.
