U.S. State Hospital Inpatient Discharge Abstracts

The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Inpatient Databases contain the universe of hospital inpatient discharge abstracts from participating U.S. states. Developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the data are translated into a uniform format to facilitate multi-state comparisons and include clinical and resource-use information from short-term, acute care, nonfederal hospitals.

Use Cases

• Analyze length of stay and total charges across patient demographics like sex and age to model hospital resource utilization.
• Study the distribution of expected payment sources, including Medicare and Medicaid, relative to diagnoses and procedures.
• Investigate admission and discharge status patterns for specific diagnoses across different states.

Strengths

• Contains the universe of inpatient discharge abstracts from participating states, ensuring population-level coverage.
• Data are translated into a uniform format to enable direct multi-state comparisons and analyses.
• Includes a core set of clinical and resource-use data elements common to all states, such as diagnoses, procedures, and demographics.

Limitations

• Data excludes elements that could directly or indirectly identify individuals, limiting certain patient-level analyses.
• Access requires a data use agreement and security training, creating a barrier to immediate use.
• Some states include specialty facility discharges or state-specific data elements, which may introduce heterogeneity.

Provenance

Source

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Collection Method

Federal-State-Industry partnership collecting hospital inpatient discharge abstracts from data organizations in participating states.

Time Range

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Freshness

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Geography

United States, with data from participating states.