NEHRS Participants

Thank you, NEHRS participants!

You have provided critical information to help track electronic health record (EHR) adoption, use, and burden.

Why participate

Your participation is important!

Experts at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) designed the National Electronic Health Records Survey (NEHRS) to represent outpatient and office-based physicians in the United States.

You were scientifically and randomly selected to represent your own practice and others like you. You cannot be replaced. Without your help, NEHRS results may be less representative of your geographic region and medical specialty.

NEHRS data and findings help drive important program and policy decisions related to EHRs, health information exchange, physician work environments, and related topics. Accurate, timely information about physicians' experiences is critical to these decisions.

How to participate

Access the 2024 NEHRS survey, if selected to participate.

If you are the physician who received the survey, you can—–

• Answer the questions yourself, or
• Identify a knowledgeable member of your office staff to complete the survey

Completing the NEHRS questionnaire should take about 20 minutes. Participation is voluntary.

Your privacy

NCHS takes participant privacy very seriously. We do not release the names of physicians who participate in the survey to anyone. This protects the privacy of individual physicians and their practices.

Only NCHS employees working directly on this project, our specially designated agents (including contractors managing the survey), and our full research partners can see identifiable information collected in the survey.

Anyone else can use your data only after all information that could identify you and your practice has been removed. All information that relates to or describes identifiable characteristics is combined with other physicians' information before it is released. This protects everyone's identity.

NCHS has many procedures to prevent the disclosure of your data to others. These procedures include data encryption, secure data networks, and many other security mechanisms that follow strict federal requirements.

Legal protections

NCHS staff, contractors, agents, and full research partners will not disclose or release responses in identifiable form without the consent of the individual or establishment in accordance with—

• Section 308(d) of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 242m(d)), and
• The Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act (44 U.S.C. 3561-3583).

In accordance with CIPSEA, every NCHS employee, contractor, and agent has taken an oath and is subject to a jail term of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both if they willfully disclose ANY identifiable information about you.

NCHS also complies with the Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2015 (6 U.S.C. §§ 151 and 151 note), which protects federal information systems from cybersecurity risks by screening their networks.

Where findings are published

NCHS experts analyze NEHRS data and publish the results in reports, web tables, and journal articles.

NCHS also releases public use and restricted data files that others can analyze. All personally identifiable information has been removed from public use files. Restricted data files contain some identifiable information. Researchers can only access restricted data files for approved purposes.

Researchers can use NEHRS data to estimate statistics for each of the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (D.C.). NCHS provides U.S. state and D.C. statistical estimates for some years in online web tables. The 2018 NEHRS and the 2024 NEHRS are designed to produce only national estimates.

Contact

If you have any questions about participating, please reach out to our NEHRS project officer, Kelly Myrick, at 301-458-4498.

For all other questions about NEHRS, please submit an inquiry to CDC-INFO.