The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is pleased to announce the release of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Kids’ Inpatient Sample (KID) featuring 2006 data. Released every three years since the 1997 data year, the KID is the only dataset in the U.S. designed specifically to study hospital use, outcomes, and charges in the pediatric (under 21 years) population. The KID’s large sample size enables studies of rare and common health care conditions, procedures, and subpopulations that may be difficult to study with other databases because children account for a relatively small proportion of hospital stays.

The KID includes a sample of pediatric discharges from the HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID). These discharges are stratified by three strata: uncomplicated in-hospital birth, complicated in-hospital birth, and all other pediatric cases. Systematic random sampling is used to select 10 percent of uncomplicated in-hospital births, 80 percent of complicated in-hospital births, and 80 percent of all other pediatric discharges included in the SID. Complicated births and other non-birth pediatric cases are over-sampled to ensure that rare pediatric conditions are captured in the KID.

The 2006 KID contains data from 3,739 hospitals in 38 states, and includes children covered by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance, and the uninsured. The data can be weighted to produce national estimates, allowing researchers and policy makers to use the KID to identify, track, and analyze national trends in health care utilization, access, charges, quality, and outcomes. Using the KID, it is possible to study varied topics, including the incidence of uncommon conditions, the economic burden associated with specific procedures or conditions, and the pediatric conditions most often associated with particular outcomes.

As part of the HCUP database family, the KID is considered by health services researchers to be one of the most reliable and affordable databases for studying important pediatric health care topics.

The 2006 KID can be purchased through the HCUP Central Distributor. More information about the KID and other HCUP products can be found on the HCUP-US Website.