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PNUM_R is a de-identified patient number provided by the HCUP Partner that is encrypted by HCUP and can be used to identify multiple admissions by the same patient within and across institutions. Because of a change in the encryption algorithm for creating PNUM_R, patients cannot be tracked from before 2003 to after 2003.
PNUM_R should not be used for analyses without first consulting summary statistics on:
- Frequencies of the number of discharges and the number of different hospitals per nonmissing PNUM_R.
- State-level counts of the number of unique nonmissing PNUM_Rs, the number of discharges associated with these PNUM_Rs, the ratio of these two numbers (discharges/patients), and the number of discharges without a PNUM_R.
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