The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Nationwide Readmissions Database (NRD) is a unique and powerful database designed to support various types of analyses of national readmission rates for all payers and the uninsured. The NRD includes discharges for patients with and without repeat hospital visits in a year and those who have died in the hospital. Repeat stays may or may not be related. The criteria to determine the relationship between hospital admissions is left to the analyst using the NRD. This database addresses a large gap in health care data - the lack of nationally representative information on hospital readmissions for all ages. Outcomes of interest include national readmission rates, reasons for returning to the hospital for care, and the hospital costs for discharges with and without readmissions. Unweighted, the NRD contains data from approximately 18 million discharges each year. Weighted, it estimates roughly 35 million discharges. Developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, HCUP data inform decision making at the national, State, and community levels.

The NRD is drawn from HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID) containing verified patient linkage numbers that can be used to track a person across hospitals within a State, while adhering to strict privacy guidelines. The NRD is not designed to support regional, State-, or hospital-specific readmission analyses.

The NRD contains more than 100 clinical and non-clinical data elements provided in a hospital discharge abstract. Data elements include but are not limited to: diagnoses, procedures, patient demographics (e.g., sex, age), expected source of payer, regardless of expected payer, including but not limited to Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, self-pay, or those billed as ‘no charge, discharge month, quarter, and year, total charges, length of stay, and data elements essential to readmission analyses. 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.