new nationwide emergency department database to support healthcare research

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently announced the public release of a new data resource that will transform research on emergency department utilization and associated costs. The Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) is produced by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) as part of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). Thomson Reuters has been the prime contractor for HCUP for more than 20 years and was instrumental in helping AHRQ develop the NEDS. The Thomson Reuters project team helped obtain discharge data from 24 states to develop the database. Working with AHRQ, the team then standardized and weighted the data to produce estimates of emergency department visits nationwide.

According to AHRQ researchers, emergency departments in the U.S. provide the point of entry for approximately 50 percent of inpatient hospital admissions and a setting for millions of treat-and-release outpatient visits annually. Emergency department (ED) care is an essential component of the nation's healthcare infrastructure and will enable analyses of ED utilization patterns. The availability of such a powerful data resource will allow researchers to evaluate important aspects of ED care delivery such as geographic variations, hospital characteristics, patient characteristics, and reasons for ED visits.

The current database uses 2006 data and includes almost 26 million ED visits from about 950 hospital-based EDs in 24 states.  These data can be used to generate estimates of 120 million weighted ED visits, which provide an exceptional resource for evaluating emergent health delivery issues. A sample of comparative studies that can be supported by the database includes:

• Use and charges of ED services
  
• Medical treatment effectiveness
  
• Quality of ED care
  
• Impact of health policy changes
  
• Access to care
  
• Utilization of health services by special populations.

Research using the NEDS can evaluate how the ED setting is utilized and what impact ED services have on healthcare costs and outcomes. For example, better preventative care for some conditions could reduce the possibility that the illness would require emergency department treatment.

About HCUP
HCUP (pronounced "H-Cup") is a family of healthcare databases and related software tools and products developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by the AHRQ. In addition to helping AHRQ develop the NEDS, Thomson Reuters supports all aspects of the project, which brings together the data collection efforts of state data organizations, hospital associations, private data organizations, and the federal government (HCUP Partners) to create a national information resource of patient-level healthcare data. HCUP includes the largest collection of longitudinal hospital care data in the United States, with all-payer, encounter-level information beginning in 1988. These databases enable research on a broad range of health policy issues, including cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to healthcare programs, and outcomes of treatments at the national, state, and local market levels.

To learn more about the NEDS. For more information about HCUP, visit the project Web site.