SPARCS: Major Potentially Preventable Complication Rates by New York Hospital, 2013 Onward

Beginning in 2013, this dataset provides observed, expected, and risk-adjusted rates for 36 major Potentially Preventable Complications (PPCs) for inpatient discharges in New York State. The data is derived from the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) and published by health.data.ny.gov. PPCs are defined as harmful events during hospitalization that may result from care processes rather than the underlying illness.

Use Cases

• Benchmark hospital performance by comparing Observed Rate per 10,000 At Risk Discharges to the Expected Rate per 10,000 At Risk Discharges across facilities.
• Analyze trends in patient safety by tracking Major PPC Discharges and Risk Adjusted Rate per 10,000 At Risk Discharges over Discharge Year.
• Identify outliers in care quality by calculating the Difference in Discharges between observed and expected complication counts for each Hospital Name.
• Assess the impact of methodology updates on reported rates by filtering data based on the PPC Version column.

Strengths

• Includes multiple calculated metrics (observed, expected, risk-adjusted rates) for comprehensive analysis of a key quality indicator.
• Provides data at the hospital level (Hospital Name, Facility ID) enabling facility-specific comparisons.
• Time series begins in 2013, allowing for longitudinal analysis of complication trends.
• Data is updated regularly, with a last recorded update on 2025-05-02.

Limitations

• Row count and total data size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• The dataset is specific to New York State discharges, which may limit generalizability to other regions.
• Metadata on data collection methodology and license is not fully specified in the provided input.

Provenance

Source

health.data.ny.gov, using Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) inpatient data.

Collection Method

PPC measures calculated using software from 3M Health Information Systems applied to SPARCS discharge records.

Time Range

Beginning 2013.

Freshness

Last updated 2025-05-02 20:01:06.

Geography

New York State, United States.