The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a cooperative agreement with NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC) to establish a vision and eye health surveillance system (VEHSS) for the nation. The VEHSS initiative aims to combine and analyze multiple existing data sources to address knowledge gaps in vision and eye health surveillance. To achieve this, the project team must identify and prioritize available sources of secondary information, define common outcome indicators, analyze and report outcomes from individual data sources, and resolve methods to harmonize or integrate multiple data sources to produce integrated national and state estimates of condition prevalence and service utilization. As an initial step, the VEHSS team reviewed national surveys for potential inclusion in the surveillance system.

This report provides a high-level overview of the vision and eye-health related questions included in sixteen national surveys. The included surveys are as follows (in alphabetical order): 1. American Community Survey

2. Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System

3. Health and Retirement Study

4. Longitudinal Supplement on Aging

5. Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey

6. Medical Expenditure Panel Survey

7. National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey

8. National Health Interview Survey

9. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

10. National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey

11. National Nursing Home Survey

12. National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project

13. National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being

14. National Survey of Children’s Health

15. National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs

16. Survey on Income and Program Participation

ReviewNationalSurveyDataVEHSS.pdf