The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is pleased to announce the release of the 2003 Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) as part of the Agency’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). HCUP is a Federal-State-Industry partnership that brings together the data collection efforts of state data organizations, hospital associations, private data organizations, and the Federal government to create a national information resource of encounter-level healthcare data.

The NIS is the largest all-payer, inpatient care database in the United States. Data from the NIS can be used to identify, track, and analyze national and regional trends in healthcare utilization, access, charges, quality, and outcomes. The NIS approximates a 20 percent sample of community hospitals in the U.S. It contains administrative discharge records drawn from the HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID), a resource that features about 90 percent of all U.S. community hospital discharges. Using a stratified, random sampling design, AHRQ selects a sample of community hospitals from the SID, and includes 100 percent of the discharges from those hospitals in the NIS. The 2003 NIS contains eight million discharge records from nearly 1,000 hospitals and features data drawn from 37 states. The 2003 NIS also features a reconstructed variable that identifies whether a patient lives in a rural or urban area, based on the patient’s ZIP Code.

For more information about the NIS, including how to obtain it, please refer to the HCUP-US Website or contact the HCUP Central Distributor at HCUPDistributor@ahrq.gov, or via phone (toll free) at (866) 792-5315.