The federal government publishes a running count of hospital visits linked to stimulant use. It is built entirely from billing paperwork. A separate federal project that also reads what clinicians actually wrote in the chart finds a large number of cases the billing paperwork never captured, and newly updated documentation puts numbers on the gap for the first time.
In emergency department data from 2020, the National Center for Health Statistics identified 21,220 encounters with documented methamphetamine use. Of those, 16,943 were found only in clinical notes. Medical codes alone would have identified roughly one in five.
