Improving and integrating data systems for public health surveillance.

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is the nation's principal health statistics agency, with a primary mission to collect, disseminate, and analyze health data. NCHS has a clear commitment to a wide range of improvements in surveillance and public health information systems. Building on its long history of conducting multipurpose surveys where the needs and interests of a variety of programmatic interests have to be accommodated, NCHS is working on a number of fronts to improve and better integrate data systems so that they will be more useful for public health surveillance. Examples include the redesign of the National Health Interview Survey, the integration of the Department of Health and Human Services' health surveys, the retooling of the vital statistics system, and the movement to subnational data collection.