The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is pleased to announce the release of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) featuring 2007 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 2007, allowing analysis of trends over time.

The NIS is nationally representative of all short-term, non-federal hospitals in the United States.  It approximates a 20 percent stratified sample of hospitals in the U.S. and is drawn from the HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID) which includes 90 percent of all discharges in the United States. The NIS includes all patients from each sampled hospital, regardless of payer — including persons covered by Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance and the uninsured.

Researchers and policy-makers to use the NIS to identify, track and analyze national trends in health care utilization, access, charges, quality and outcomes.  The vast size of the NIS enables analyses of infrequent conditions, such as rare cancers; uncommon treatments, such as organ transplantation; and special patient populations, like the uninsured.  Its size also allows for the study of topics at both national and regional levels.  In addition, NIS data are standardized across years to facilitate ease of use.

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 health care topics. More information about the NIS and other HCUP products can be found on the HCUP-US Web site.  If you have questions, please contact HCUP user support at hcup@ahrq.gov.