Monday, October 3, 2016

Using H-CUP to find National Length-of-Stay Stats for Hip and Knee Replacements - a guest post from Michele Matucheski


I had a reference question this week asking for the current national Length-of-Stay averages for Hip and Knee Replacements, respectively.   Health Stats questions are often challenging and I’m left wondering where to look, but with some direction from a few helpful MedLibbers (Mark Vrabel at The Oncology Nursing Society and Anne Woznica at The Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons), I re-discovered H-CUPnet this week.

What is it?
“H-CUPnet is a free online query system based on data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP).  It provides access to health statistics and information on hospital inpatient and emergency department utilization.” 

If you need stats on hospital discharges or length of stays by specific diagnoses or procedures, this tool is just the thing!
As the name suggests, you can also pull cost numbers as well.    You can even choose patient characteristics such as age,  gender, insurance status, and location – Don’t worry : Patient data is entirely anonymous.  Hospital Characteristics can also be scoped to hospital ownership, location, and/or bedsize so you can more easily see how YOUR hospital(s) measure up. 

In order to help myself remember how I got the answer, I made a little Screencast video to explain how to generate the most useful report for this particular Length-of-Stay question.    I thought it might be helpful for my WHSLA colleagues as well :



Using H-CUPnet to Find Length-of-Stay Stats [Screencast]

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