If a patient is treated in the emergency department and then admitted to the same hospital, there is typically one inpatient discharge record in the SID which ideally has information on the charges for services performed in the ED captured in revenue codes. For critical access hospitals, the procedure of creating one combined discharge record may not always be followed because of billing practices required by Medicare. In these cases, two separate discharge records are created â one for the ED services in the SEDD and one for the inpatient stay in the SID. If the data source identifies these split records, then HCUP includes that information in the HCUP variable SPLIT_IPED. This variable will be in both the SEDD and SID, if available. Because critical access hospitals are small, the occurrence of these split records is in the SEDD and SID is also very small. It should be noted, that for states without the SPLIT_IPED data element, the practice of creating split records also occurs, but the affected records cannot be easily identified.
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