Thomson Reuters | Media Advisory: Comprehensive Healthcare Statistics...

17 Dec 2008

Media Advisory: Comprehensive Healthcare Statistics and Reports Are Available to Journalists on AHRQ Web Site

Ann Arbor, MI December 17, 2008 — Anyone with access to the Internet can find reliable statistics and analysis on hospital care in the United States including facts and figures such as these:

Between 1998 and 2006, the number of first-time Caesarian-section births grew by 55 percent and repeat C-sections grew by 98 percent, while the number of vaginal deliveries declined.
The Western United States had the lowest rate of hospitalization for depression of any region in 2006 — 62 stays per 100,000 individuals. The Midwest had the highest rate — three times that of the West.
Hospital patients with a principal diagnosis of asthma were more likely than all discharges to be uninsured or covered by Medicaid.

These are some of the facts found in a report, HCUP Facts and Figures, which offers a sample of the comprehensive statistics available from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The recently released report, produced by AHRQ with support from the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters, can be accessed online at the HCUP Web site. The report includes information on overall hospital utilization, frequent diagnoses, frequent procedures, patient demographics, hospital costs, and other inpatient statistics.

HCUP Facts and Figures presents information derived from the 2006 HCUP Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), as well as trend information as far back as 1993. The NIS is part of HCUP’s family of healthcare databases, software tools and products for advancing research. HCUP includes the largest, all-payer encounter-level collection of longitudinal healthcare data in the United States.

The report contains:

Overview statistics about hospitals stays — including number of hospitalizations, average length of stay, reasons for hospitalization, patient age, and payer.
Information about inpatient hospital stays by diagnosis and procedure and the cost of hospital stays.
Statistics about five medical conditions deemed priorities by the Institute of Medicine and the Department of Health and Human Services — childbirth, depression, cancer, asthma, and arthritis.

The HCUP Facts and Figures report is available at no charge in HTML and PDF formats on the HCUP Web site. On the Web site is another HCUP report series with information on hospital-related visits, the HCUP Statistical Briefs, which are short, individual reports on focused health care topics.

Researchers Katie Levit (Thomson Reuters), Elizabeth Stranges (Thomson Reuters), Katheryn Ryan (Thomson Reuters), and Anne Elixhauser (AHRQ) authored HCUP Facts and Figures, 2006: Statistics on Hospital-based Care in the United States.

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