Acute Inpatient Stays

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.

Comments

The CLM_FROM_DT for the first claim associated with the stay must have been in the year of the data file, however it was permissible for the CLM_THRU_DT to have occurred in January of the following year.

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 2 cost/use categories from the IP data files: Acute and the OIP.

Source: CCW (derived)