National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey for Drug Mentions, 1985. Public Use Data Tape Documentation

摘要

The National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) provides data on ambulatory medical care rendered in physicians' offices. The NAMCS is a continuous survey based on a sample of patient visits to a national sample of office-based physicians. The survey obtains information on the volume of office visits by age, race, and sex of the patient and by selected physician characteristics such as type of specialty and practice and geographic location. Data describing the clinical substance of the visits include the patient's problem or complaint, prior visit status, referral status, major reason for visit, ethnicity of the patient, physician's diagnosis, diagnostic and therapeutic services provided, disposition, and duration of the visit. In 1980 and 1981, and in 1985, the NAMCS collected information on all drugs/medications ordered, administered or provided during the visit. To facilitate analysis of these drug data, a data tape has been prepared which includes a separate record for each drug entered on each sample encounter form. This particular tape, for 1985, called the drug mention tape, contains information on 71,182 drugs mentioned in the national sample of 71,594 patient visits. The information contained in the drug mention tape is derived from two major sources. Patient visit and physician characteristics are derived from the 1985 NAMCS.