Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The National Children’s Study (NCS) was a planned large-scale, long-term study of U.S. children and their parents designed to study environmental and genetic influences on child health and development. Gunnison led the requirements definition and user acceptance testing for the pilot and went on to assist in the same capacity for the main study.

National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

The CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is a program of studies designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States. The survey is unique in that it combines interviews and physical examinations.

Gunnison has been supporting the NHANES and its continuous technological innovations for over 15 years. Gunnison helped develop the system architecture and telecommunications infrastructure for the NHANES, the hallmark of which is several fully automated Mobile Exam Centers which travel around the nation collecting health information on approximately 5,000 sampled people each year. The NHANES infrastructure consists of over 50 tightly integrated management, interview, examination, laboratory information and data analysis subsystems.

Gunnison continues to support the project today providing software development expertise, database administration, and software testing services.

National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys

Gunnison supported the National Center for Health Statistics/Census Bureau in their efforts to modernize and fully automate the two major Ambulatory Health Care Surveys.

National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS)
National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS)

Gunnison supported identifying state-of-the-art data collection approaches to improve the data quality and timeliness of data collection for both the induction interviews and patient record forms for the NAMCS and NHAMCS. These improvements are essential to making data collection faster and more accurate, enabling an increase in the sample size and supporting a new study on clinical management and risk factors for certain diseases.

Gunnison was tasked with identifying and evaluating data collection tools for integration into the surveys. This includes evaluating rapidly changing technology and emerging automated systems for data collection, data processing and control, survey and case management, and data security. Hand-held mobile devices, web-based tools, ICD-9/10 autocoding tools, and security tools are examples of technologies that were considered.