Federal and other clients often need to conduct surveillance activities or evaluate programmatic impacts but may lack the resources for large scale primary data collection efforts.  

NORC’s Health Analytics program has developed methods and expertise to address surveillance, evaluation, and research questions using secondary data sources that have already been collected, such as medical payment claims, electronic health records, nationally representative surveys, and published study estimates.  

NORC has worked with the CDC’s Vision Health Initiative to build the Vision and Eye Health Surveillance System using data collected from Secondary sources. We are working with the CDC’s Division of Population Health to develop a small area estimates of hearing loss for the United States and with the National Institute on Aging to build the country’s first surveillance system of diagnosed Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s related dementias. For CDC’s Division of Injury Prevention, NORC is using electronic health records and administrative payment claims in conjunction with a primary data collection to evaluate the effectiveness of the CDC STEADI Fall Prevention Initiative.