National Hospital Discharge Survey

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 National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) 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 Division of Health Interview Statistics, within the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics collects medical and demographic information from a sample of inpatient discharge records selected from a national probability sample of short-stay hospitals. The data is obtained from two sources: a manual system in which abstracts are created from medical records and transcripts from hospital discharges, and an automated system in which NCHS buys datasets which contain machine-readable medical record data. The resulting data are published annually in the National Hospital Discharge Survey data file.  The health data store created a data dictionary for the file , which lists and describes the data elements and the file layout.

Some useful data elements included in the NHIS are:

• Up to 7 diagnosis codes, including diagnosis at time of admission
• ICD-9 Procedure Codes
• DRG indicators
• Demographic variables such as age, sex, race and marital status
• Expected source of payment
• Length of Stay
• Inpatient death indicators
• Source of admission
• Hospital descriptors such as bed size and geographic region

RPC holds the 2009 release of these files, which is the most recent year available

Reporting Hospitals
The data is taken from a sample of inpatient, non federal or institutional hospitals in the United States. The sample of hospitals is limited to hospitals that have more than 6 regularly staffed hospital beds. In 2009, data was analyzed from 205 hospitals.

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 NHDS data has many potential uses for healthcare planners, financial analysts, and researchers. RPC offers custom reports using the NHDS 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 and financial data that can be gathered from the file are included below.

• Diagnosis trends over time and geographic region
• Procedure trends over time and geographic region
• Procedure and diagnosis rates by patient sex and age group
• Average inpatient length of stay across patient groups and geographic regions
• Discharge status patterns
• Historical discharge, procedure, and diagnosis trends

Data Suppression
All individual identifiers are removed from the NHDS data by the National Center for Health Statistics.