MORTALITY: US hospital mortality rate 1.89 percent in 2013

Data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) are available on a great free online site that you can use to run state and national statistics on hospital utilization and cost by patient diagnosis or procedures.  It’s a collection of databases, which separately address the hospital inpatient setting, children in the hospital inpatient setting, the emergency department, readmissions, and state-specific data.

Recently, a caller to the AHA Resource Center asked for a national average for HOSPITAL MORTALITY RATE.  I decided to see what could be found on this in HCUPnet.  The following data are from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) on HCUPnet.  Another nice feature of this database is that it contains all-payer data – not limited to Medicare data.

• 1.89 percent (672,510 inhospital deaths based on records for 35.6 million discharges) in 2013

It is easy to re-do the same query on earlier years, so I did.  The results are consistent for the five most recent years (see below).  Likewise, the number of total discharges contained in each year of the data are consistent – at about 36 to 37 million.

U.S. Hospital Mortality Rate Trends: Most recent 5 years

• 1.89 percent (2013)
• 1.84 percent (2012)
• 1.87 percent (2011)
• 1.86 percent (2010)
• 1.89 percent (2009)

Going back to the earliest available year – 1997 – the mortality rate was 2.45 percent.

Source: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.  HCUP national (nationwide) inpatient sample.  Click here: http://hcupnet.ahrq.gov  Posted by AHA Resource Center (312) 422-2050, rc@aha.org