Hospital Admission Data from the Agency for HealthCare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ, formerly the
Agency for Health Care Policy and Research) maintains the Healthcare
Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). HCUP is a Federal-State-industry
partnership to build a standardized, multi-State health data
system. AHRQ has taken the lead in developing HCUP databases,
Web-based products, and software tools and making them available for
restricted access public release.

HCUP comprises a family of administrative longitudinal
databases-including State-specific hospital-discharge databases and a
national sample of discharges from community hospitals.

HCUP databases contain patient-level information compiled in a uniform format
with privacy protections in place.
* The Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) includes inpatient data from a
national sample (about 20% of U.S. community hospitals) including roughly 7
million discharges from about 1,000 hospitals. It is the largest all-payer
inpatient database in the U.S.; data are now available from 1988-1998. The
NIS is ideal for developing national estimates, for analyzing national
trends, and for research that requires a large sample size.
* The State Inpatient Databases (SID) cover individual data sets in
community hospitals from 22 participating States that represent more than
half of all U.S. hospital discharges. The data have been translated into a
uniform format to facilitate cross-State comparisons. The SID are
particularly well-suited for policy inquiries unique to a specific State,
studies comparing two or more States, market area research, and small area
variation analyses.

* The State Ambulatory Surgery Databases (SASD) contain data from
ambulatory care encounters in 9 participating States. The SASD
capture surgeries performed
on the same day in which patients are admitted and released form hospital-
affiliated ambulatory surgery sites. The SASD are well suited for research
that requires complete enumeration of hospital-based ambulatory surgeries
within market areas and States.
* The project's newest restricted access public release is the Kids'
Inpatient Database (KID), containing hospital inpatient stays for children
18 years of age and younger. Researchers and policymakers can use the KID
to identify, track, and analyze national trends in health care utilization,
access, charges, quality, and outcomes. The KID is the only all-payer
inpatient care database
for children in the U.S. It contains data from approximately 1.9 million
hospital discharges for children. The data are drawn from 22 HCUP 1997 State
Inpatient Databases and include a sample of pediatric general
discharges from
over 2,500 U.S. community hospitals (defined as short-term, non-Federal,
general and specialty hospitals, excluding hospital units of other
institutions). A key strength of the KID is that the large sample size
enables
analyses of both common and rare conditions; uncommon treatments, and organ
transplantation. The KID also includes charge information on all patients,
regardless of payer, including children covered by Medicaid, private
insurance,
and the uninsured.

HCUP also contains powerful, user-friendly software that can be used
with both HCUP data and with other administrative databases. The AHRQ has
developed three powerful software tools Quality Indicators (QIs), Clinical
Classification Software (CCS) and HCUPnet. See more on the agency's
webpages.