Overview of the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) The Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) is part of a family of databases and software tools developed for the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). The NEDS is the largest all-payer emergency department (ED) database in the United States, yielding national estimates of hospital-based ED visits. Unweighted, it contains data from approximately 30 million ED visits each year. Weighted, it estimates roughly 135 million ED visits.
Developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, HCUP data inform decisionmaking at the national, State, and community levels. This page provides an overview of the NEDS. For more details, see NEDS Database Documentation and the Introduction to the NEDS, 2014 (PDF file, 684 KB). Contents:
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Sampled from the State Inpatient Databases (SID) and State Emergency Department Databases (SEDD), HCUP's NEDS can be used to create national and regional estimates of ED care. The SID contain information on patients initially seen in the ED and then admitted to the same hospital. The SEDD capture information on ED visits that do not result in an admission (i.e., treat-and-release visits and transfers to another hospital). NEDS data are available from 2006 through 2014, which allows researchers to analyze trends over time. Key features of the most recent NEDS database year (2014) include:
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The NEDS contains clinical and resource-use information that is included in a typical discharge abstract, with safeguards to protect the privacy of individual patients, physicians, and hospitals (as required by data sources). The NEDS is composed of more than 100 clinical and nonclinical variables for each hospital stay. These include:
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As a uniform, multi-State database, the NEDS promotes comparative studies of health care services and supports health care policy and research on a variety of topics, including:
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NEDS releases for data years 2006 through 2014 are available for purchase through the HCUP Central Distributor. All HCUP data users, including data purchasers and collaborators, must complete the online HCUP Data Use Agreement Training Tool, and must read and sign the Data Use Agreement for Nationwide Databases (PDF file, 55 KB; HTML). The NEDS are available for purchase online through the HCUP Central Distributor. Questions regarding purchasing databases can be directed to the HCUP Central Distributor:
E-mail: HCUPDistributor@AHRQ.gov
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The NEDS data set is extremely large. The data are distributed as comma-separated value (CSV) files delivered via secure digital download from the Online HCUP Central Distributor. The files are compressed and encrypted with SecureZIP® from PKWARE. To load and analyze the NEDS data on a computer, users will need the following:
Please note the following based on the software you plan to use:
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Internet Citation: NEDS Overview. Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). December 2016. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/nedsoverview.jsp. |
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Last modified 12/16/16 |