SPARCS: 2016 New York State Hospital Inpatient Discharges with Charges and Outcomes

New York State's 2016 de-identified inpatient discharge records detail patient characteristics, treatments, and financials. The Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) file contains discharge-level data on diagnoses, services, and charges with protected health information removed. Data includes columns for APR DRG Description, Length of Stay, Total Charges, Facility Name, and Patient Disposition.

Use Cases

• Predicting Length of Stay using Age Group, APR Severity of Illness Code, and Type of Admission (from 29 available columns).
• Analyzing cost drivers by correlating Total Charges with APR DRG Description and CCS Procedure Code (from 29 available columns).
• Profiling hospital service areas by aggregating Facility Name, Health Service Area, and Hospital County (from 29 available columns).
• Studying payment models using Payment Typology columns and Patient Disposition (from 29 available columns).

Strengths

• Contains 29 columns of detailed clinical and administrative data, including APR DRG Description and Total Costs.
• Data is de-identified per HIPAA, with direct identifiers like specific dates removed.
• Last updated on 2025-04-01, indicating recent metadata maintenance.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to New York State hospital discharges from 2016.

Provenance

Source

health.data.ny.gov

Collection Method

Administrative discharge data collected via the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS).

Time Range

2016

Freshness

Data covers the year 2016; metadata was last updated 2025-04-01 18:29:20.

Geography

New York State, United States