David C. Goff, Jr., MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Public Health Sciences and Internal Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC

The learner objectives of this presentation was to become familiar with data sources available to support CVD surveillance and CVH program evaluation, including data sources for information on mortality, morbidity, medical outcomes, quality of care, access to care, and risk factors. Public health professionals and their partners who are developing cardiovascular health programs need access to data in order to develop appropriate insight regarding the burden of disease and the impact of programmatic activities. Data should be used to identify areas of high burden, trends in disease burden over time and changes in disease burden in association with program implementation. The best available database for mortality may be the death certificate database maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control. These data are accessible through the CDC Wonder web site. Data regarding morbidity, medical outcomes and quality of care can be obtained from the National Health Care Survey (including the National Hospital Discharge Survey and the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, Medicare, Peer Review Organizations, Medicaid, Managed Care Organizations, the National Commission on Quality Assurance (HEDIS data), the American Heart Association (Get With The Guidelines Program), the American College of Cardiology and other registries. Data regarding access to care and risk factors can be obtained from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. Professionals developing cardiovascular health programs should develop relationships with their state epidemiologists and other epidemiologists in their areas who have expertise working with these databases.