Hospital Inpatient Discharges (SPARCS De-Identified): Potentially Preventable Complication

Potentially Preventable Complication (PPC) group rates for hospital inpatient discharges, beginning in 2013. The dataset groups 66 individual PPC measures into 8 categories, providing observed and risk-adjusted rates per 10,000 discharges by hospital and statewide. Data is sourced from the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) and published by health.data.ny.gov.

Use Cases

• Benchmark hospital safety performance using Observed Rate per 10,000 Discharges and Risk Adjusted Rate per 10,000 Discharges across PPC Group Name categories.
• Analyze temporal trends in complication rates by filtering on Discharge Year and grouping by PPC Group Number.
• Identify statistically significant outliers in hospital performance by cross-referencing Significance flags with Hospital Name and PFI identifiers.
• Compare complication rates across different PPC Version definitions to assess the impact of measurement methodology changes.

Strengths

• Includes risk-adjusted rates, which account for patient severity differences, for 8 PPC groups.
• Provides both observed and risk-adjusted rates per 10,000 discharges for direct comparison.
• Data is updated regularly, with a last update timestamp of 2025-05-02 20:07:09.
• Derived from a statewide administrative database (SPARCS), suggesting systematic collection.

Limitations

• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality and completeness require manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

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

Collection Method

PPCs were calculated using SPARCS data with software from 3M Health Information Systems.

Time Range

Beginning 2013.

Freshness

Last updated 2025-05-02 20:07:09.

Geography

State of New York, USA.