Analysis: Uniform Hospital Discharge Data Set

Uniform Hospital Discharge Data Set
Veronica Burgos
Kaplan University The year was 1969, when a conference was held by the National Center for Health Services Research and Development and Johns Hopkins to address hospital discharge abstract systems. A hospital discharge abstract system is an “abstraction of minimum data set from hospital charts for the purpose of producing summary statistics about hospitalized patients” (Porta, 2014). During that conference participants discussed the possibility of all short term general hospitals in the country start collecting a minimum set of patient specific data elements, which they referred to as the Uniform Hospital Discharge Data Set (UHDDS). UHDDS is used by acute care, short term and long term care hospitals to report inpatient data elements in a
Diagnosis related groups, or DRGs, are “groups of patients classified for measuring a medical facility's delivery of care. The classifications, used to determine Medicare payments for inpatient care, are based on primary and secondary diagnosis, primary and secondary procedures, age, and length of hospitalization” (Diagnosis, n.d.). The DRG classification system is widely utilized. One DRG is assigned to each inpatient stay. It also uses data elements of principal diagnosis, principal procedure, and other significant procedures into the DRG algorithms. That is why it depends on accurate selection and coding to report the elements correctly. In 1984 UHDDS was revised by NCVHS, with it later being adopted by the federal health programs in 1986. Currently, in addition to being used by hospital UHDDS can also be used with other organizations like rehabilitation facilities, nursing & retirement communities, and home health care