The Health Care Cost and Utilization Project is the office within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that provides training materials and webinars, as well as statistical reports that you can use in your daily work. All of these publications are available at www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov .  Recent offerings include the following:

·         C-Section rates up, episiotomy and forceps rates down: Use of episiotomy, a surgical incision to widen the vaginal area during childbirth, fell by 60 percent between 1997 and 2008, but the proportion of hospital stays of women who delivered via cesarean section (C-section) increased by 72 percent during the same period. Statistical Brief #110, Hospitalizations Related to Childbirth, 2008 also shows that 40 percent of all childbirth stays were billed to Medicaid, 53 percent to private insurers, 4 percent were uninsured, and the rest were charged to other payers.

·         Increases in uninsured hospital stays go from 4 percent in 2003 to 21 percent in 2008:  In Statistical Brief #108, Hospital Stays, 2008, AHRQ found that there were 2.1 million uninsured admissions in 2008, compared to 1.8 million in both 2003 and 1998, and the average cost of a 2008 uninsured hospital stay was $7,300.

·         Almost 2 million hospital patients suffer from medication injuries: The number of people treated in US hospitals for illnesses and injuries from taking medicines jumped 52 percent between 2004 and 2008, from 1.2 million to 1.9 million Statistical Brief # 109, Medication-related Adverse Outcomes in US Hospitals and Emergency Departments, 2008 explains that, while about 60 percent of these injuries were from specific medications, including antibiotics, hormones, painkillers, and antidepressants, about 40 percent were from unspecified medications.

·         The importance of older patients:  In 2008, more than one in five patients in US hospitals were born before 1933, and treating patients age 75 and older cost hospitals more than $92 billion, compared with $65 billion for patients ages 65 to 74.  These findings are based on data described in Statistical Brief #103, Hospital Utilization among Oldest Adults, 2008.  The report uses data from the 2008 Nationwide Inpatient Sample, a database of hospital inpatient stays in all short-term, nonfederal hospitals.  The data are drawn from hospitals that comprise 95 percent of all discharges in the United States and include patients, regardless of insurance type, as well as the uninsured.

·         Growth in Medicaid patient hospital admissions outpace those for privately insured patients:  Hospital admissions of patients covered by Medicaid jumped by 30 percent between 1997 and 2008, compared to a 5 percent growth in those of patients with private health insurance. Statistical Brief #104, Medicaid Hospitalizations, 2008 also describes how, over the time period, average cost for a Medicaid patient stay rose 11 percent, far less than the 34 percent cost increase for privately insured stays and the 26 percent increase for uninsured patients (adjusted for inflation).

·         Over 3.4 million emergency room visits due to back pain:  An average of 9,400 emergency room visits a day in the US were related to back-problems in 2008, according to Statistical Brief #105, Emergency Department Visits and Inpatient Stays Related to Back Problems, 2008.  In the same year, there were over 663,000 inpatient stays (a daily average of nearly 1,820 hospitalizations) principally for back surgery or other back disorder treatments.

·         Hospitalization for chronic lung disease depends on patient income, place of residence:  Statistical Brief # 106, Overview of Hospitalizations among Patients with COPD, 2008. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is an incurable and often fatal disease that includes bronchitis, emphysema or both. Nearly one out of every five patients aged 40 years and older hospitalized in the US has a diagnosis of COPD, either as the main reason for the hospital stay or as a contributing illness. Low-income Americans with COPD and those who lived in rural areas or in the South or Midwest in 2008 had the highest rates of hospitalization for symptoms of the disease.

·         Online tutorial series:  HCUP has developed a series of free, interactive courses to provide data users with information about HCUP data and tools, and training on technical methods for conducting research with HCUP data. The online courses are modular, so you can either move through an entire course, or access sections that interest you the most.  Two new modules include the following: 

o    The all-new Calculating Standard Errors tutorial is designed to help users determine the precision of the estimates they produce from the HCUP nationwide databases. Users will learn two methods for calculating standard errors for estimates produced from the HCUP nationwide databases.

o     The newly-revised HCUP Overview Course is a helpful introduction to HCUP for new users. The original course has been updated to include the latest additions to the HCUP family of databases and tools, including the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample.