National Center for Health Statistics

Overview

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is the principal federal health statistics agency of the United States, housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It produces the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which compiles death certificate data from all 50 states and DC — the primary source of U.S. mortality rate numerators. NCHS also conducts major health surveys (NHIS, NHANES) and publishes the Vital and Health Statistics monograph series, which includes technical reports on data quality, measurement methodology, and standard-population revisions.

Key Contributions / Features

• Publishes official age-adjusted death rates, cause-of-death statistics, and life tables by race, sex, and cause through the National Vital Statistics Reports (NVSR)
• Implemented the transition from the 1940 to the 2000 U.S. standard population for age-standardization of death rates, effective with data year 1999 — see Age Standardization and Anderson and Rosenberg 1998 — Age Standardization of Death Rates Implementation of the Year 2000 Standard
• Commissioned and published the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS) validation of death certificate race/ethnicity reporting, which quantified CR = 1.30 for AIAN and confirmed the Hispanic mortality paradox survives misclassification correction (Arias et al. 2008) — see Death Certificate Race-Ethnicity Misclassification and Funeral Director Proxy Coding
• Uses the Funeral Director Proxy Coding system for assigning race/ethnicity on death certificates — a structural source of numerator-denominator mismatch relative to census self-report denominators

Related

• Death Certificate Race-Ethnicity Misclassification
• Funeral Director Proxy Coding
• Age Standardization
• Mortality by Race and Ethnicity
• Elizabeth Arias
• Social Security Administration

Sources

• Arias et al 2008 — The Validity of Race and Hispanic Origin Reporting on Death Certificates in the United States
• Anderson and Rosenberg 1998 — Age Standardization of Death Rates Implementation of the Year 2000 Standard
• Murphy et al 2021 — Mortality in the United States 2020
• Parra et al 2022 — The COVID-19 Pandemic Years of Life Lost and Life Expectancy Decomposition Using Individual-Level Mortality Data