The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has released its 2007 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) -- the largest, all-payer emergency care database in the United States. NEDS can help public health experts, policymakers, health care administrators, researchers and others find the data they need to answer questions about the cost of emergency care, medical treatment effectiveness, and the quality of, access to, and use of emergency department, and other issues. The database contains more than 26 million records of emergency department visits at roughly 1,000 U.S. community hospitals – approximately a 20-percent stratified sample -- and captures information both on visits that do not result in admission and those that do. NEDS is part of the AHRQ's Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), a Federal-State-industry partnership for building a standardized, multi-state health data system. For more information about NEDS, go to http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/nedsoverview.jsp.