The Department of Health and Human Services’, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, has recently released the
2013 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS).
The NEDS is the largest all-payer emergency department (ED) database in the United States. It was created to enable analyses of ED utilization patterns and support understanding and decision-making regarding this critical source of health care. Constructed using records from both the HCUP
State Emergency Department Databases (SEDD) and the
State Inpatient Databases (SID), the 2013 NEDS contains data from nearly 30 million ED visits and encompasses all encounter data from 950 hospital-based EDs in 30 states – approximating a 20-percent stratified sample of EDs from community hospitals. Weights are provided to calculate national estimates pertaining to the almost 136 million ED visits that took place in 2013. The NEDS provides information on "treat-and-release" ED visits, as well as ED visits in which the patient was admitted to the same hospital for further care.
Additional information about the NEDS is located on the Databases Page of the HCUP User Support Website at
https://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/databases.jsp.