California Emergency Department and Ambulatory Surgery Data

RPC knows that data collection and working with large data sets can be a challenge, and has created the Health Data Store to serve as a continuously updated repository of health care data. The Health Data Store can provide you with customizable data, ranging from large nation-wide data sets to smaller and more pointed reports or health care snapshots. Our experience working with California Emergency Department and Ambulatory Surgery data allows us to query and package the data with confidence. We can also incorporate information from several different data sets to create in-depth, longitudinal analysis of the health care markets you are interested in. Please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss how the Health Data Store can help you with your information needs.

The California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) collects and publishes data on emergency department (EDs) and ambulatory surgery providers operating in the state. The ambulatory surgery data includes encounters from both general hospitals and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers. Each record in the dataset contains information on one outpatient encounter (or visit) for each instance of treatment. The health data store holds a data dictionary for the file, which lists and describes the data elements and the file layout.

The data set includes information on the types of care provided and demographic characteristics of patients receiving care. Some useful data elements included in the California ED and Ambulatory Surgery data are:

Some useful data elements include:

• Payment Source
• Patient disposition at discharge
• Cause of injury
• Up to 25 ICD-9 Diagnosis codes
• Procedures performed by CPT code
• Facility name
• Patient demographic information such as age group, gender and area of residence

California releases the files twice a year, and RPC holds the most recent six-month period available.

Data Applications
We can provide custom reports, graphs and maps using this data file and combining it with other health care and demographic files.

The tabulations and analysis RPC offers based on data from the California Emergency Department and Ambulatory Surgery data has many potential uses for healthcare planners, financial analysts, and hospital executives. RPC offers custom reports using the California Emergency Department and Ambulatory Surgery data, and our consultants are happy to talk to you about how we can use the file to best meet your needs. A sample of the kinds of healthcare data that can be gathered from the file are included below.

• Procedure frequencies by provider or geography
• Historical analysis of encounter numbers by provider
• Case mix analysis of diagnoses encountered and procedures performed
• Historical and/or geographical analysis of patient encounters
• Historical or comparative analysis of procedures performed by patient diagnosis

Data Masking
In order to protect individual privacy, the California OSHPD masks combinations of demographic variables to make sure files are de-identified. Each record has the minimum number of fields masked to ensure it is no longer a unique record in the dataset. The most commonly masked variables are age in years (rather than age group) and ethnicity. The Data Dictionary contains a complete listing of variables that may be masked, and the order in which they are masked.

Data Use Restrictions
Due to confidentiality agreements, the Health Data Store can only release tabulations and analyses based on this data and not the raw data itself.