HCUP State Level Trend Inpatient Stay 2003-2015

Data for this report were from the HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID) and quarterly data if available. The unit of analysis is the hospital discharge (i.e., the hospital stay), not a person or patient. This means that a person who is admitted to the hospital multiple times in one year will be counted each time as a separate “discharge” from the hospital. Counts are summarized by discharge quarter. Information based on quarterly data should be considered preliminary. Quarterly data will be replaced by the State’s complete annual SID for the year when it is available. This analysis was limited to patients treated in community, non-rehabilitation hospitals in the State. Discharge counts for inpatient stays excluded transfers out to another acute care hospital.

Adult discharges were categorized into five hospitalization types in the following hierarchical order: maternal, mental health/substance use, injury, surgical, and medical. Medical discharges are identified by a medical DRG. The DRG grouper first assigns the discharge to an MDC based on the principal diagnosis. For each MDC there is a list of procedure codes that qualify as operating room procedures. If the discharge involves an operating room procedure, it is assigned to one of the surgical DRGs within the MDC category; otherwise it is assigned to a medical DRG. If the DRG indicated the information on the record was ungroupable (i.e., not identifiable as medical or surgical), then the discharge was assumed to be medical. This rarely occurred (less than 0.1 percent of total discharges). Available States are participating in both HCUP and the HCUP Fast Stats tool.

Quarterly counts have been rounded up to the nearest 50 inpatient stays. If a cell in the Data worksheet is empty, either the number has been suppressed due to small sample size or the data are unavailable (i.e., not all States have data for all quarters). This file includes all back year data, not all of which will be displayed in HCUP Fast Stats. Discharge counts are adjusted for community, non-rehabilitation hospitals that were not included in the SID or quarterly data. Weighting for missing hospitals used the following information from the American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey of Hospitals to define strata within the State: Ownership (government, private nonprofit, and private investor-owned), Size of the hospital based on the number of beds (small, medium, and large categories defined within region), Location combined with teaching status (rural, urban nonteaching, urban teaching). Counts less than 26 were suppressed for confidentiality and will cause a discontinuity in the trend lines displayed in the figures.