Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project

The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) was developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), in partnership with entities that maintain statewide hospital administrative databases, to provide multistate, population-based data on both insured and uninsured patients in a uniform format.

Participating states contribute their statewide hospital administrative databases, which contain information from discharge summaries, and HCUP makes the data available for public use. When a patient is discharged from a hospital or a hospital-affiliated facility, an abstract is created that summarizes the administrative information related to the hospitalization. Within individual states, the discharge summaries are incorporated into databases by an agency of the state government, a hospital association, or another organization designated to collect this information. The individual statewide databases contain similar information; ...