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This variable is contained in the following files:
SAS Name
ACUTE_STAYS
This variable is the count of acute inpatient hospital stays (unique admissions, which may span more than one facility) for the year. An acute inpatient stay is defined as a set of one or more consecutive acute inpatient hospital claims where the beneficiary is only discharged on the most recent claim in the set. If a beneficiary is transferred to a different provider, the acute stay is continued even if there is a discharge date on the claim from which the beneficiary was transferred.
The CLM_THRU_DT for the last claim associated with the stay must have been in the year of the data file. Stays that cross-over into another calendar year would only appear in the year when the stay ended (e.g., a stay that began in 2017 but ended in 2018 would only be counted as a stay in the 2018 file).
Acute inpatient hospital claims are a subset of the claims in the IP data file consisting of data from both acute hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAH). These facilities are those where either the 3rd digit of the provider number (SAS variable PRVDR_NUM) = 0 or the 3rd and 4th digits of PRVDR_NUM = 13.
There are two cost/use categories from the IP data files: Acute and the OIP.