The United States lacked consistently measured data on Americans’ vision loss and eye conditions. 

Vision loss is one of the most common and debilitating health conditions in the United States, affecting more than 7 million people and costing more than $134 billion per year. Understanding how many people are affected by eye conditions, who they are, and where they live is to developing policy and allocating resources to improving vision and eye health nationally. But before 2015, no system tracked the prevalence of vision loss nor the dozens of diseases affecting our eyes, and standardized case definitions needed to consistently identify eye conditions were not available. The surveillance systems that did exist relied on primary data collection and case reporting, which is resource intensive and infeasible for vision health.   

NORC developed a national surveillance system based on secondary data sources and statistical modeling.

To address this issue, NORC launched an ambitious effort to construct a national surveillance system by systematically analyzing, organizing, and presenting estimates across multiple existing data sets. Leveraging input from clinical and technical experts, we identified sources of claims data, nationally representative surveys, and electronic health records sufficient to track 17 eye diseases and 93 clinical sub-classifications.

For the most important vision health conditions, we worked with our partner, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, to create composite prevalence estimates based on information from multiple data sources. For example, our project’s composite estimates of vision impairment and blindness used data from a nationally representative measurement of evaluated vision impairment and high-quality data from population-based studies to estimate the total amount of vision loss and blindness in the United States. We then used self-reported survey data from the American Community Survey to estimate how these cases were distributed geographically and by age, race and ethnicity, and gender.

NORC’s success on this project would not have been possible without our funder and cooperative agreement partner, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vision Health Initiative. We also relied on outside experts, including from the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Academy of Optometry, several universities and medical centers, and Prevent Blindness, the leading public advocacy group for vision health.