The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is pleased to announce the release of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) featuring 2006 data. The NIS is the largest all-payer inpatient care database in the United States and is updated annually. It is available from 1988 to 2006, allowing analysis of trends over time.

The NIS is nationally representative of all short-term, non-Federal, community hospitals in the United States. It is based on a 20 percent stratified sample of hospitals from the HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID) and comprises 90 percent of all discharges in the United States. The data include all patients, regardless of payer—including persons 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 NIS to identify, track, and analyze national trends in healthcare utilization, access, charges, quality, and outcomes. The vast size of the NIS enables analyses of rare conditions, such as congenital anomalies; uncommon treatments, such as organ transplantation; and special patient populations, like the uninsured. Its size also allows the study of topics at both the national and regional levels. In addition, NIS data are standardized across years, to facilitate ease of use.

The 2006 NIS contains data from over 8 million hospital stays. It encompasses all discharge data from 1,045 hospitals in 38 states. For most states, the NIS includes hospital identifiers that allow linkages to the American Hospital Association's Annual Survey Database and county identifiers that permit linkages to the Area Resource File (ARF) from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The NIS contains clinical and resource use information included in a typical discharge abstract, with safeguards to protect the privacy of individual patients, physicians, and hospitals (as required by data sources).

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

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