SECTION 1 – BACKGROUND
The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) is a family of healthcare databases and related software tools and products developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). HCUP databases bring together the data collection efforts of State data organizations (e.g., state public health agencies), state hospital associations, private data organizations, and the Federal government to create a national information resource of encounter-level healthcare data. HCUP includes the largest collection of longitudinal hospital care data in the United States, with all-payer, encounter-level information beginning in 1988. These databases enable research on a broad range of health policy issues, including cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to healthcare programs, and outcomes of treatments at the national, State, and local market levels. There is no comparable product on the market.
HCUP databases fill needs that other large databases cannot fulfill. For example, the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) is a national probability survey designed to meet the need for information on characteristics of inpatients discharged from non-Federal short-stay hospitals in the United States. HCUP databases have a number of advantages that are not available in NHDS, such as:
- Large sample sizes that allow for research on uncommon conditions and procedures
- Census of hospitals within states allowing for state-level analyses and market-area studies
- Patient charge data allowing for economic studies
- Other uses include basic enumeration, epidemiology, health services research, planning, marketing, and trend analysis.
SECTION 2 – PURPOSE
The CDC’s Division of Health Informatics and Surveillance (DHIS) coordinates the acquisition of and access to HCUP databases for the agency. In order to acquire the most recent HCUP state databases for use at CDC, DHIS staff review the HCUP state databases currently available from the AHRQ Central Distributor (e.g., some state databases are available through 2016) and compare them to current CDC state HCUP database holdings. This process is necessary as AHRQ releases HCUP state databases throughout the year; therefore, databases from multiple states and potentially across several years are released between annual CDC HCUP state database purchases. Appendix A reflects the outstanding HCUP state databases that need to be acquired under this contract and their associated costs (based on an agreed upon pricing algorithm for CDC).
Different programs across CDC have been using HCUP state databases to monitor, identify, diagnose, investigate, and research public health related issues on topics of importance to the nation’s health, and will continue this work using the databases acquired through this contract. The output from these activities will be scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, presentations, reports, and policy briefs.
SECTION 3 – SCOPE OF WORK
To provide select HCUP State Inpatient Databases (SID), State Ambulatory Surgery Databases (SASD), and State Emergency Department Databases (SEDD) on CD-ROMs to CDC. Please see Appendix A for a list of HCUP state databases to be acquired and their associated costs.
SECTION 4 – TASKS TO BE PERFORMED
The vendor shall provide the agreed upon HCUP SID, SASD, and SEDD databases (see Appendix A) on CD-ROMs to CDC. The vendor will also provide access to supplemental files used with these databases (these will be shipped to CDC by the vendor, as available within the contract period and upon request). CDC shall maintain ownership of the databases and any supplemental files indefinitely as long as the agency remains in compliance with AHRQ Data Use Agreement terms…
