What are the SID?

The State Inpatient Databases (SID) are part of the family of databases and software tools developed for the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). Together, the State-specific SID encompass more than 97 percent of all U.S. hospital discharges. In addition, the SID are well-suited for research that requires complete enumeration of hospitals and discharges within geographic areas or States.

Address Critical Topics

Rely on the SID to study State-level inpatient healthcare issues, including:

• Access to care
• Quality of care and patient safety
• Use and cost of hospital services
• Variations in medical practice
• Healthcare cost inflation
• Medical treatment effectiveness
• Impact of health policy changes
• Diffusion of medical technology
• Study multiple hospital visits for the same patient
• Utilization of health services by special populations

Advance Your Research

Apply more than 100 clinical and nonclinical variables to your research, including:

• Principal and secondary diagnoses and procedures
• Patient demographic characteristics such as sex, age, and (for some States) race
• Total charges
• Expected payer
• Length of stay
• Admission and discharge status

A Comprehensive, User-Friendly Resource

Each participating State's SID includes inpatient discharge records from community hospitals in that State. To facilitate multistate comparisons and analyses, data are translated into a uniform, user-friendly format. Available annually since 1990, SID files include all patients, regardless of payer, thus providing a unique view of inpatient care in a defined market or State over time.

Expand Your Analyses

Use HCUP Tools. Free tools and software are available to estimate hospital costs, assess quality of care, and identify comorbidities. Most tools also can be used with other administrative healthcare databases.

Link to Other Data. Information from sources such as the American Hospital Association Annual Survey Database and the Area Health Resources Files can be linked to some of the SID to enhance your analyses.

Investigate the Continuum of Care. Combine SID data with HCUP's State Ambulatory Surgery and Services Databases and the State Emergency Department Databases to reveal a more complete picture of care.

Easy to Purchase

HCUP's SID are available for purchase from the online HCUP Central Distributor: www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/tech_assist/centdist.jsp. The HCUP Central Distributor is the entity that accepts, processes, and fulfills applications for the purchase and use of HCUP databases. Each State database is sold separately.

SID data are provided on CD/DVD in ASCII format. A statistical software package, such as SAS®, SPSS®, or Stata®, is required for analysis. Programs to load data into software packages are provided.

For a list of prices (including discounted student rates) and complete purchasing information, visit the HCUP-US website: www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov. This site also provides access to aggregate statistics from the SID through the free online query resource known as HCUPnet, and it contains detailed information about the Data Use Agreement, data elements, and software tools.



The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP, pronounced "H-Cup") is a family of powerful healthcare databases, software tools, and products for advancing research. Sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), HCUP includes the largest all-payer, encounter-level collection of longitudinal healthcare data (inpatient, ambulatory surgery, and emergency department) in the United States, beginning in 1988.

HCUP is a Federal-State-Industry Partnership that brings together the data collection efforts of many organizations — such as State data organizations, hospital associations, private data organizations, and the Federal Government — to create a national information resource. HCUP would not be possible without the contributions of data collection Partners from across the nation.

For more information about HCUP, please visit www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov.