Re-engineered National Vital Statistics System (reNVSS) Rajesh Virkar DVS/NCHS June 8, 2010

Background National Vital Statistics System is a collection of many separate systems on different platforms (e.g. Mainframe, Unix Servers, PC/Servers) Two different certificates being used (1989 Revision and 2003 Revision) Three different years are “open” at the same time (e.g. 2008, 2009 and 2010) Need to get off the mainframe

Scope Develop a system that collects, processes, aggregates and analyzes birth, death and fetal death data for all 57 reporting jurisdictions Generate reports from processing birth, death-demo, fetal death data and infant death data Make data available to other analytical tools

Goals Increase the capability and responsiveness in providing data to subject matter branches Reduce the time needed for sending reports back to the jurisdictions Reduce the time needed for supplied data to become available for publication

Objectives Single seamless user environment (look-and-feel, design, etc.) Feedback on data to jurisdictions Move as many rules to the front-end of processing as possible Merge death-demo and death-med data as soon as data is available Process linked file for missing linkages and death data cross-edits on a regular basis

reNVSS file naming No change from the published convention, yet! –File names to follow SSYRXXXT.DAT SS: the transmitting jurisdiction YR: the last two digits of the data year XXX: the numeric shipment number T: the revision status DAT: the certificate type (NAT, MOR, FET)

reNVSS Status Revised and non-revised natality in production Revised mortality-demographic is in test Non-revised mortality-demographic is next Followed by revised and non-revised fetal deaths, and integration with death- medical processing

reNVSS Errors Validation errors –Simple validation errors –Compound validation errors Verification errors –Simple verification errors –Compound verification errors

reNVSS validation errors Some jurisdictions are seeing a high number of errors Causes –Our old system was inadequate and did not catch some of the errors –Follow the edit specs published on the web –Some business rules are tweaked

Review of validation errors Ranked all states by their 2009 natality validation error rates 17 states had error rates of 3% or higher Focused on 14 that were revised Examined the errors that contributed to their high number of validation errors

Validation errors – a quick review Total validation errors – 4,049,259 –Edit flag errors – 3,214,535 –Risk factor-related errors – 465,249 –Errors related to data conversion – 144,016 –> 94% of the errors are system related

reNVSS errors update Over the last two weeks, two jurisdictions have sent in single updates to their data –State A reduced their validation error count from over 1,607,561 to 429 –State B reduced their validation error count from 472,419 to 29 –More than half of the total validation errors have gone away!

Other comments on reNVSS “Seeing some errors again…” –Error suppression “Error reports in MS Excel format” –The capability is there, but we need to spend some extra time to make the reports more usable in Excel “… large women giving birth…” –We will review this and other errors that appear ‘new’

reNVSS – STEVE connectivity New requirement for all states to begin using STEVE to send data by 2013 Working with the STEVE team / IJE Committee to define the gaps Once requirements are agreed upon, design and develop solutions on both sides IJE committee to determine impact on state systems Dump Stanley, go to STEVE!

Conclusions We all want better data – Only validation errors are presented here (there may be other quality problems with the data!) Improvements in quality are needed We will work with the states We will share the business rules document in the near future

Thanks! For questions, please contact your assigned: –Vital Statistics Specialist or Statistician in DAEB –Rajesh Virkar,