Hospital Inpatient Discharges (SPARCS): Patient Safety Indicators by Hospital, 2009 Onward

Beginning in 2009, this dataset contains hospital discharge counts and calculated rates for Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). It is produced by health.data.ny.gov using New York's Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) inpatient data and US Census data for area-level measures. The data includes observed, expected, and risk-adjusted rates with confidence intervals for potential in-hospital complications and adverse events.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking hospital performance using `Compare to State`, `Compare to National`, and `Risk Adjusted Rate`.
• Analyzing trends in patient safety events over `Year` and by `Hospital Region` or `Hospital County`.
• Modeling the relationship between hospital volume (`Total Cases`) and safety outcomes (`Observed Rate`, `Expected Rate`).
• Identifying hospitals with statistically significant outlier performance using `Upper 95CI RAR` and `Lower 95CI RAR`.

Strengths

• Data is calculated using AHRQ's established PSI methodology, providing standardized measures.
• Includes confidence intervals (`Upper 95CI RAR`, `Lower 95CI RAR`) for risk-adjusted rates, supporting statistical interpretation.
• Covers a long time series beginning in 2009, enabling longitudinal analysis.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the socrata platform and New York State sources.

Provenance

Source

health.data.ny.gov using New York Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) data.

Collection Method

PSI measures calculated from SPARCS inpatient data using AHRQ methodology; US Census data used for area-level denominators.

Time Range

Beginning 2009.

Freshness

Last updated 2025-08-13 13:45:01.

Geography

New York State, presented by hospital and county.