The mission of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans. To help fulfill this goal, AHRQ sponsors the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), a family of health care databases and related software tools, products, and statistical reports to inform policy makers, health system leaders, researchers, and the public.

Through partnerships with a number of State, Federal, and Industry organizations, HCUP has grown from a single database limited to inpatient hospital care to a family of six state- and national-level databases, covering inpatient, ambulatory surgery, emergency department, and pediatric encounters. As a result, HCUP has become the largest all-payer resource of multi-year hospital discharge data from community, non-Federal, short-term (acute care), general, and specialty hospitals in the U.S.

The HCUP databases enable research on a wide range of topics, including treatment use and diagnostic trends, medical practice patterns, readmissions, cost and quality of health services, preventable hospitalizations, payer trends, and outcomes of treatments at the national, state, and local market levels. The Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), the most popular of the six HCUP databases, and the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS), are the data sources for the HCUP Facts and Figures, which provide an overview of national statistics on hospital stays since 2005 and trends from 1993.

Contents

• HCUP Facts and Figures: Statistics on Hospital-Based Care in the United States, 2009
  Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP).
  Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2011.
• HCUP Facts and Figures: Statistics on Hospital-based Care in the United States, 2008
  Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP).
  Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2010.
• HCUP Facts and Figures: Statistics on Hospital-Based Care in the United States, 2007
  Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP).
  Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2009.
• HCUP Facts and Figures, 2006: Statistics on Hospital-Based Care in the United States
  Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP).
  Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2008.
• HCUP Facts and Figures: Statistics on Hospital-Based Care in the United States, 2005
  Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP).
  Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2007.