The Office of Health Care Statistics, Utah Department of Health provides ambulatory surgery (AS) and emergency department (ED) records to HCUP in two separate files. One file contains information on selected ambulatory surgeries occurring in hospital outpatient departments, hospital-affiliated ambulatory surgery centers, and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers. The second file contains emergency department encounters (identified by revenue codes in the range 450 to 459) from all Utah licensed hospitals. If a patient comes into the ED and has an ambulatory surgery, that record is included in the AS file.

The list of procedures that qualify as ambulatory surgery in Utah include the following:

The following records were excluded from the HCUP Utah ambulatory surgery files:

• Discharges with disposition of "still a patient" were excluded.

Using the standard HCUP criteria for assigning records to the 2003 SASD and positive emergency room charges for assigning records to the SEDD, the Utah outpatient source records are separated as follows:

• 37% of source records are assigned to the SASD
• 62% of source records are included in the SEDD
• 2% of source records are excluded.

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

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

1997 Utah SASD. There are 53 unique DSHOSPID values in the 1997 UT SASD.

• 39 have the AHAID coded indicating they are a hospital-based facility.
• 1 facility (DSHOSPID=307) with a missing AHAID is a hospital-based facility. DSHOSPID 307 provided inpatient data for the 1997 UT SID and is therefore considered a hospital-based facility.
• The remaining 13 facilities with DSHOSPID coded and the AHAID missing should be considered freestanding ambulatory surgery centers.

Possible Data Problems for one Utah Hospital. Please use the 1997 data for DSHOSPID="408" with caution. Based on a cursory review of the hospital's data, the following problems were identified:

• The original discharge date field was shifted by one character causing most of the reported dates to be invalid. During HCUP processing, YEAR was assigned to 97 and DQTR and DDATE were assigned using the shifted position.
• DISP was missing (DISP = .) on 74% of the discharges, and
• the median total charge (TOTCHG) was $14.