Hospital Discharge Data
Query and Data

Interactive Query System: Use this system to obtain information about the most common reasons for hospitalizations in Illinois. Available summaries of discharge information cover hospital care for asthma, diabetes, cancers, major surgical procedures, cardiac care and many other conditions treated in Illinois hospitals. See the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Clinical Category Software for a complete list of disease categories and surgical descriptions that can be queried. Note that only the single level category codes and descriptions are used.

Annual Reports: Reports are available at no charge and can be downloaded from the Annual Reports section. The modules are in portable document format (PDF), a platform-independent format used universally on the Internet to exchange files. The most widely used software for handling PDF files is Acrobat by Adobe Systems Inc. Acrobat Reader allows anyone to view/print/save PDF files and can be downloaded for free by clicking on the Get Acrobat Reader icon.

Quick Data: This quick reference for important state health care data provides a summary of annual statistics for all data reported by Illinois hospitals in an easy-to-read table along with annual statistics for three major health conditions: coronary bypass surgery, asthma and diabetes.

Public Data Files: The Public data files contain patient level discharge information from Illinois hospitals. While the data have been aggregated where necessary to protect patient confidentiality they still comprise an important tool that health care researchers can use to study a wide variety of conditions and surgeries. Data are grouped in files by calendar year and compressed to minimize the download time necessary. However, the compresssed files are relatively large files (approximately 26-30MBytes each). Users are advised not to download these files using a dialup connection. In addition to the public data files, associated support files containing diagnosis related groups (DRGs) and tables containing descriptions for codes such as age groups, patient status, source and type of admission, payer types and clinical category descriptions also are available. These support files are compressed into two separate archives, one for DRG files and the other for code description tables.