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The Enhancing Health Data (EHealth) Program serves as the Census Bureau’s hub for administrative health data and research. We partner with external data owners to strategically reuse and link administrative records—particularly health records—to gain new insights on:
We structure our efforts around three main areas of work that collectively help to answer some of our nation’s most pressing health care questions:
Why Enhance Health Data?
The mission of the Census Bureau is to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy. An important part of this mission is to use the data assets already available at Census to explore issues of relevance to the American public and policy makers. Few issues rank as important as US health and health care, as policy makers look to improve health outcomes, lower costs, reduce complexity, and understand the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Building a better understanding of these trends requires data. This data has traditionally been collected via surveys of patients and providers. Declining response rates and increased costs have led researchers to look for alternative sources of information. In particular, the rapid growth in electronic health records offers a rich new source of continuously collected “big data” on the workings and outcomes of the US health care system. While this brings several benefits over surveys, electronic health records often suffer from a lack of important sociodemographic, economic, and other critical characteristics about the lives of patients that is needed to put this information in context.
Our program seeks to bridge these gaps by enhancing administrative health data so that it can better help answer our nation’s most pressing questions. We do this by linking health records to restricted person- and business-level data maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau and our partners. This data joining promises important new insights as health outcomes are highly correlated with many of the subjects on which the Census Bureau already collects data (income, poverty, race, health insurance, labor markets, and other social determinants of health). By strategically repurposing and linking this already available data, we are building a data infrastructure that empowers researchers, policy makers, and the public to uncover helpful new insights on patients, providers, and population health.
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