Health Data Store

Questions?

Contact Health Data Specialist,
Emily Birmingham

THCIC Inpatient Discharge Data

The Texas Department of State Health Services collects and releases information on Texas inpatient hospital discharges and outpatient visits on a quarterly basis. There are now records for over 3 million discharges and 12 million visits annually. The DSHS files hold patient-level data for individual inpatient and outpatient hospital stays and include data on diagnoses, procedures, charges, and patient demographics. RPC holds these files from 1999 to the most recently released quarter.

Some useful data elements include:

Patient gender
Patient age group
Admission source
Patient county and zip code
Two payment sources
25 diagnosis codes
25 surgical procedure codes

Reporting Hospitals

There are approximately 600 hospitals in the state of Texas. DSHS collects data from all state licensed hospitals except for those that do not seek insurance payment or government reimbursement, and those that meet the following statutory criteria for rural exemption:

hospitals located in a county with a population of less than 35,000, or hospitals located in an area that the Census Bureau does not define as urbanized, which have fewer than 100 licensed beds; and
are not a state-owned hospital or owned by an entity that owns or manages one or more other hospitals.

Data Applications

The tabulations and analysis RPC offers based on DSHS data has many potential uses for healthcare planners, financial analysts, and hospital executives. RPC offers custom reports using the DSHS data, and our consultants are happy to talk to you about how we can use the file to best meet your needs.

Data Suppression and Restrictions

To protect patient identity, the Texas Hospital Discharge data suppresses certain fields in instances where their inclusion may jeopardize patient anonymity, and also suppress physician identities. The last two digits of patient zip codes that have less than 30 discharges are also masked.
Because of data use restrictions, RPC cannot sell access to the raw data, but can provide a wide array of tabulations and descriptive statistics using the Texas Hospital Discharge data.