OSHPD California Hospital Inpatient Discharge 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 OSHPD California Hospital Inpatient Discharge 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.

California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) collects inpatient discharge data from all licensed inpatient hospitals in California. The data are updated on a semiannual basis, and there are approximately four million records per year. Each record in the dataset corresponds to an individual inpatient hospital discharge. The file has patient-level data and includes information on patient demographics, diagnosis and procedure codes, payment source, admission source and total charges. The Health Data Store holds a copy of the data elements description file , which provides details for each data element.

Some useful data elements include:

• Patient Zip Code
• Patient Sex and race
• Up to 5 Diagnosis Codes
• Up to 5 External Cause of Injury Indicators
• Up to 6 Procedure Codes
• Length of Stay
• Total Charges
• Principal Payer

OSHPD collects data twice each year, in September and March. The submitted discharge data is reviewed by OSHPD for completeness and correctness, and there is a 2% error threshold for a dataset from a hospital to be deemed complete. The data for both periods is combined, and the data is released once each year.

RPC also holds OSHPD outpatient data, which is described in detail on a separate page. 916-326-3802

Reporting Hospitals
In the most recent year of data available, OSHPD collected information from over 500 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 OSHPD inpatient hospital data has many potential uses for healthcare planners, financial analysts, and hospital executives. RPC offers custom reports using California’s OSHPD 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.

• Service mix analysis, using diagnosis and procedure codes
• Average charges by region, diagnosis, and procedure
• Payor mix analysis by geographical region
• Patient demographic analysis by region and payor
• Procedure and diagnosis rates by patient sex, age and race
• Average inpatient length of stay across geographies, procedures and patient populations
• Referral and discharge patterns
• California inpatient market shares and outmigration by zip code
• Historical discharge, patient origin, diagnosis and procedure trends

Data Suppression
In order to protect patient anonymity, OSHPD masks patient social security numbers and reports them as 9 digit alphanumeric identifiers, known as the Record Linkage Number.

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