The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) provides HCUP with ambulatory patient data from short-term acute care hospitals, freestanding ambulatory surgery centers, radiation therapy centers, lithotripsy centers, cardiac catheterization laboratories, and providers of radiation therapy. Any Florida ambulatory surgery center which has a total of 200 or more visits per quarter is required to report data to AHCA. Facilities with fewer than 200 patient visits in a quarter must certify this fact in writing each quarter, in order to be exempt.

Using the standard HCUP criteria for assigning records to the 2003 SASD, the Florida outpatient records are separated as follows:

• 99.9% of records are included in the SASD
• 0.1% of records are excluded.

Identifying Freestanding Facilities. Starting in 1998, the data element FREESTANDING identifies hospital-based and freestanding facilities. Prior to 1998, there are two identifiers on the SASD that allow a researcher to distinguish hospital-based and freestanding facilities.

• DSHOSPID is the facility identifier provided by the data source.
• AHAID is the facility identifier used by the American Hospital Association.

1997 Florida SASD. There are 491 unique DSHOSPID values in the 1997 FL SASD.

• 199 have the AHAID coded indicating they are a hospital-based facility.
• The remaining 292 facilities with DSHOSPID coded and the AHAID missing should be considered freestanding ambulatory surgery centers.

Identifying the Type of Facility. The type of facility can be identified by the first 2 to 4 digits of the Florida hospital identifier stored in the HCUP data element DSHOSPID

• Hospital-based ambulatory surgery centers are identified by:
• First four digits of DSHOSPID = "0010"
• First four digits of DSHOSPID = "0011"
• First four digits of DSHOSPID = "0012"
• First two digits of DSHOSPID = "23"
• Freestanding ambulatory surgery centers are identified by:
• First four digits of DSHOSPID = "0000"
• First two digits of DSHOSPID = "14"
• Freestanding radiation therapy centers are included only until December 2002. They are identified by:
• First four digits of DSHOSPID ="0020"
• Freestanding cardiac catherization laboratories are identified by:
• First four digits of DSHOSPID = "0050"
• Freestanding lithotripsy centers are identified by:
• First four digits of DSHOSPID = "0052"