Version Date: Jan 22, 2009 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
United States Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Center for Health Statistics
Series:
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08600.v2
Version V2
The National Hospital Discharge Survey provides data on the utilization of nonfederal short-stay hospitals. It is a continuous survey based on a sample of medical records of patients discharged from a national sample of these hospitals. The survey contains information on the patients' demographic characteristics (sex, date of birth, age, race, and marital status), dates of admission and discharge, discharge status, diagnoses, and surgery performed.
Export Citation:
The data contain dash [-], equal sign [=], apostrophe ['], and right parenthesis [)] codes.
Sampling is done in two stages. Sample hospitals are drawn with probabilities ranging from certainty for large hospitals to 1 in 40 for the smallest hospitals. Sample discharges are then selected by a random technique based on the patient's medical record number. The sampling ratio for selecting sample discharges within each hospital varies inversely with the probability of selection of the hospital. This is to assure that the overall probability of selecting a discharge is the same in each size class.
Discharges from short-stay hospitals listed in The National Master Facility Inventory of Hospitals and Institutions excluding military and VA hospitals as recorded on each hospital's daily discharge listing. Short-stay hospitals are defined as those facilities whose average inpatient stay is less than thirty days.
Hospital records transcribed to abstract forms by either hospital staff or United States Census Bureau employees.
1987-01-12
2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
2009-01-22 The documentation has been updated.
2008-11-18 New files were added. These files included one or more of the following: Stata setup, SAS transport (CPORT), SPSS system, Stata system, SAS supplemental syntax, and Stata supplemental syntax files, and a tab- delimited ASCII data file.;
2006-01-18 File CB8600.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.
1987-01-12 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.
ICPSR usually offers files in multiple formats for researchers to be able to access data and documentation in formats that work well within their needs. If you have questions about the accessibility of materials distributed by ICPSR or require further assistance, please visit ICPSR’s Accessibility Center.

This study is maintained and distributed by the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), the aging program within ICPSR. NACDA is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Heath (NIH).