The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) State Inpatient Databases (SID) are a set of hospital databases that contain the universe of hospital inpatient discharge abstracts from data organizations in participating States. The data are translated into a uniform format to facilitate multi-State comparisons and analyses. The SID are based on data from short term, acute care, nonfederal hospitals. Some States include discharges from specialty facilities, such as acute psychiatric hospitals. The SID include all patients, regardless of payer and contain clinical and resource use information included in a typical discharge abstract, with safeguards to protect the privacy of individual patients, physicians, and hospitals (as required by data sources). Developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), HCUP data inform decision making at the national, State, and community levels.

The SID contain clinical and resource-use information that is included in a typical discharge abstract, with safeguards to protect the privacy of individual patients, physicians, and hospitals (as required by data sources). Data elements include but are not limited to: diagnoses, procedures, admission and discharge status, patient demographics (e.g., sex, age), total charges, length of stay, and expected payment source, including but not limited to Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, self-pay, or those billed as ‘no charge’. In addition to the core set of uniform data elements common to all SID, some include State-specific data elements. The SID exclude data elements that could directly or indirectly identify individuals. For some States, hospital and county identifiers are included that permit linkage to the American Hospital Association Annual Survey File and county-level data from the Bureau of Health Professions' Area Resource File except in States that do not allow the release of hospital identifiers.

Restricted access data files are available with a data use agreement and brief online security training.