The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released two reports on hospital inpatients. The first report, “Emergency Department Visits by Persons Recently Discharged from U.S. Hospitals,” focuses on patients who were discharged from any hospital in the preceding seven days. Emergency department (ED) visits among these patients are important because they may indicate poor inpatient care or follow-up planning. Report highlights include the following:
- Approximately 7 percent of all hospitalizations (2.3 million) resulted in an ED visit within seven days of discharge.
- For every 1,000 hospital inpatients discharged alive, 21 were re-admitted through the ED within seven days of the discharge.
- Uninsured persons were nearly three times as likely as privately insured persons to make an ED visit following hospital discharge.
The second report, “2006 National Hospital Discharge Survey” presents the most recent summary statistics on inpatient discharges from non-federal, short-stay, U.S. hospitals. The report highlights select long-term trends, including an increasing proportion of hospital inpatients 75 years and over between 1970 and 2006, declining rates of coronary atherosclerosis discharges between 2002 and 2006, and the doubling in discharge rates for knee replacement surgery between 2000 and 2006.
The data upon which these reports are based are available to the public as part of the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) and the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS). Both surveys collect data from national probability samples of non-federal U.S. hospitals. See http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/hdasd/nhds.htm for NHDS public use data files and documentation and http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/ahcd/ahcd1.htm for NHAMCS files and documentation.
