CHIA Releases Massachusetts Acute Care Hospital Inpatient Discharge Data Report

DATE: December 17, 2020

A report released today from the Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) offers new insights into hospital inpatient utilization patterns in the period leading up to the outbreak of COVID-19. Massachusetts Acute Care Hospital Inpatient Discharge Data presents key measures of inpatient utilization overall and by hospital, patient, and discharge characteristics. The report marks the first in a new series providing analyses and trends from CHIA's Acute Hospital Case Mix Database, which is a database of stay-level encounters with acute care hospitals going back more than 20 years.

This report establishes an important baseline of inpatient utilization that can be used for public health initiatives, analyses of preventable hospitalizations and readmissions, and comparative cost and outcomes research. To better understand the vital role of inpatient services in the continuum of health care services in the Commonwealth, CHIA has analyzed inpatient stays in Massachusetts acute care hospitals over a four-year period, from Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2016 to FFY 2019.

In addition to this report, CHIA is developing parallel reports for emergency department encounters and the outpatient observation stays to be published in 2021.

This report is also accompanied by a databook and technical appendix. For further information about the Massachusetts Acute Hospital Case Mix Database, including information about data governance, data submissions, data enhancements, and use cases, please see the Overview of the Massachusetts Acute Hospital Case Mix Databases (December 2019).