The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP, pronounced "H-Cup") is a family of health care databases and related software tools and products developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). HCUP databases bring together the data collection efforts of State data organizations, hospital associations, private data organizations, and the Federal government to create a national information resource of patient-level health care data (HCUP Partners). HCUP includes the largest collection of longitudinal hospital care data in the United States, with all-payer, encounter-level information beginning in 1988. These databases enable research on a broad range of health policy issues, including cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to health care programs, and outcomes of treatments at the national, State, and local market levels.

HCUP's objectives are to:

• Obtain data from the Statewide information sources.
• Design and develop multi-State health care databases for health services research and health policy analysis.
• Make these data available to a broad set of public and private users.

provide data beginning in 1988 and contain encounter-level information for all payers compiled in a uniform format with privacy protections in place.

HCUP databases include:

The Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) with inpatient data from a national sample of over 1,000 hospitals.

The Kids' Inpatient Database (KID) is a nationwide sample of pediatric inpatient discharges.

The State Inpatient Databases (SID) contain the universe of inpatient discharge abstracts from participating states.

The State Ambulatory Surgery Databases (SASD) contain data from ambulatory care encounters from hospital-affiliated and sometimes freestanding ambulatory surgery sites.

The State Emergency Department Databases (SEDD) contain data from emergency department encounters from hospital-affiliated emergency departments.

Many of the HCUP databases are available for purchase through the HCUP Central Distributor.

• NIS (starting in 1988)
• KID (1997 and 2000)
• SID (starting in 1995)
• SASD (starting in 1997)

At this time, the SEDD is under development and not yet available for purchase.

The HCUP databases have been a powerful resource for the development of tools that can be applied to other similar databases by health services researchers and decision makers.

HCUPnet is an interactive tool for identifying, tracking, analyzing, and comparing statistics on hospital care. HCUPnet queries generate statistics in a table format using data from the NIS and SID databases for those States that have agreed to participate.

The AHRQ Quality Indicators (QIs) are measures of health care quality that make use of readily available hospital inpatient administrative data. The AHRQ QIs consist of three modules measuring various aspects of quality. Software and user guides for all three modules are available to assist users in applying the Quality Indicators to their own data.

The Clinical Classifications Software (CCS), was developed with HCUP data and is available for downloading. The CCS provides a method for classifying diagnoses or procedures into clinically meaningful categories, which can be used for aggregate statistical reporting of a variety of types.