Population Health and Vital Statistics

Hospital Inpatient Discharges & Emergency Room Visits Statistics

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The hospital inpatient discharge data are collected by the Cost Reporting and Discharge Data Review Section.

An inpatient discharge occurs when a person who was admitted to a hospital leaves that hospital. A person who has been hospitalized more than once in a given calendar year will be counted multiple times as a discharge and included more than once in the hospital inpatient discharge data set; thus, the numbers in this report are for discharges, not persons. All county-level data are based on patient zip code of residence and not the location of hospitalization. Federal, military and Department of Veteran Affairs hospitals are excluded. All discharges are for the residents of Arizona. Discharges of out-of-state residents are not included in this report. Discharges of inpatients exclude newborn infants. The emergency room (ER) and the inpatient hospitalization data are mutually exclusive. The ER data include only those who were not admitted as inpatients.

On October 1, 2015, a new revision of the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification/Procedure coding Systems (ICD-10-CM/PCS) was implemented in replacement to the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) for reporting medical diagnoses and inpatient procedures in healthcare settings. ICD-10-CM represents an expansion of ICD-9-CM both in content and structure of the codes used to describe the severity and complexity of various diseases and injuries. In the current report, the diagnostic and procedures codes for inpatient and Emergency Room (ER) visits data are based both on ICD-9-CM, which was in effect up until September 30th, 2015, and ICD-10-CM/PCS implemented on October 1, 2015. The transition to ICD-10-CM/PCS has some impact on comparability of hospital discharges data and continuity of statistical trends. Any comparison of hospital discharge events between 2015 and previous years should take into account the differences between the classification systems.

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