Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project
The Healthcare Cost and Utilization (HCUP) Project is a family of healthcare databases developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
It provides access to healthcare databases for research and policy analysis, as well as tools and products to enhance the capabilities of the data.
HCUP databases combine the data of State data organizations, hospital associations, private data organizations, and the Federal Government to create a national information resource of patient-level healthcare data.
HCUP includes multiyear hospital administrative inpatient, outpatient, and emergency department data in the United States.
Such databases allow research on health and policy issues at the national, State, and local levels, including cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to healthcare, and outcomes of treatments.
It is used to study, e.g.: breast cancer, depression, and multimorbidity, incidence and cost of injuries, role of socioeconomic status in patients leaving against medical advice, multiple chronic conditions and disparities in readmissions, and hospitalization costs for cystic fibrosis.
The records can identify, track, and analyze national trends in healthcare use, access, charges, quality, and outcomes.
There are eight types of HCUP databases: four with national- and regional-level data and three with State- and local-level data.
National Inpatient Sample (NIS)
Kid’s Inpatient Database (KID):
Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS)
Nationwide Readmissions Database (NRD)
Nationwide Ambulatory Surgery Sample (NASS): yielding national estimates of major ambulatory surgery encounters performed in hospital-owned facilities.
State Inpatient Databases (SID): databases from the universe of inpatient discharge abstracts from participating States, released annually.
State Ambulatory Surgery and Services Databases (SASD).
State Emergency Department Databases (SEDD): are hospital-affiliated emergency department data for visits in participating States that do not result in hospitalizations.
HCUPnet (https://hcupnet.ahrq.gov/) is an online query system that provides healthcare statistics and information from the HCUP national (NIS, NEDS, KID, and NRD) and State (SID, SASD, and SEDD) databases for those States that have agreed to participate.
HCUPnet can be used for identifying, tracking, analyzing, and comparing statistics on hospital inpatient stays, emergency care, and ambulatory surgery, as well as obtaining measures of quality-based information from the AHRQ Quality Indicators.
HCUPnet also includes a feature called hospital readmissions that provides users with some statistics on hospital readmissions within 7 and 30 days of hospital discharge.
HCUP Fast Stats Edit
HCUP Fast Stats (https://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/faststats/landing.jsp) is a web-based tool that provides easy access to the latest HCUP-based statistics for healthcare information topics. HCUP Fast Stats uses visual statistical displays in stand alone graphs, trend figures, or simple tables to convey complex information at a glance. Fast Stats topics are updated regularly (quarterly or annually, as newer data become available) for timely, topic-specific national and State-level statistics.