The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released the 2017 Nationwide Readmissions Database (NRD), an annual database designed to generate national estimates of readmissions. The NRD includes discharges for patients with and without repeat hospital visits in a year and those who have died in the hospital. This database addresses a large gap in healthcare data—the lack of nationally representative information on hospital readmissions for all patients, regardless of the expected payer for the hospital stay.

The 2017 NRD uses the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) State Inpatient Databases (SID) from 28 States with verified patient linkage numbers that can be used to track a person across hospitals within a State, while adhering to strict privacy guidelines. Unweighted, the NRD contains data from approximately 18 million discharges each year. Weighted, it estimates roughly 36 million discharges in the United States.

The NRD can be purchased through the HCUP Central Distributor. Additional information is located on the NRD Overview Page.