The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) National Inpatient Sample (NIS) is the largest publicly available all-payer inpatient care database in the United States. The NIS is designed to produce U.S. regional and national estimates of inpatient utilization, access, cost, quality, and outcomes. Unweighted, it contains data from more than 7 million hospital stays each year. Weighted, it estimates more than 35 million hospitalizations nationally. Developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), HCUP data inform decision making at the national, State, and community levels.

Starting with the 2012 data year, the NIS is a sample of discharges from all hospitals participating in HCUP, covering more than 97 percent of the U.S. population. For prior years, the NIS was a sample of hospitals. The NIS allows for weighted national estimates to identify, track, and analyze national trends in health care utilization, access, charges, quality, and outcomes. The NIS's large sample size enables analyses of rare conditions, such as congenital anomalies; uncommon treatments, such as organ transplantation; and special patient populations, such as the uninsured. NIS data are available since 1988, allowing analysis of trends over time.

The NIS inpatient data include clinical and resource use information typically available from discharge abstracts with safeguards to protect the privacy of individual patients, physicians, and hospitals (as required by data sources). Data elements include but are not limited to: diagnoses, procedures, discharge status, patient demographics (e.g., sex, age), total charges, length of stay, and expected payment source, including but not limited to Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, self-pay, or those billed as ‘no charge’. The NIS excludes data elements that could directly or indirectly identify individuals.

Restricted access data files are available with a data use agreement and brief online security training.