New Jersey Hospital Discharge Data
Admission and discharge dates, hospital and physician provider identifiers, services rendered, charges, and insurance information for New Jersey hospitals
All encounters occuring in New Jersey hospitals
Access
Identifiable New Jersey hospital discharge data are available to researchers who have received IRB approval from Rowan University, which partners with the New Jersey Department of Health (NJ DOH) to review access to data for research, and who have executed a data use agreement (DUA) with NJ DOH. Researchers must first submit an electronic IRB application to Rowan University, comprised of a financial interest form, consent forms, research materials, protocol template, detailed data to be obtained, investigator CVs, the Agreement for Ethical Conduct of Human Subjects Research, and other pertinent materials. Researchers should know what data they plan to request prior to submitting an IRB application. Rowan University IRB will then determine if a study requires IRB review and a data use agreement (DUA). The DUA would then be executed between the researchers and NJ DOH.
Once IRB approval is granted and a DUA executed, researchers can request data through the online NJ DOH Data Request Tracking System.
Timeline for Access
Expedited IRB review for research projects with minimal risk takes at least three weeks. Projects with more than minimal risk needing full board review will takes at least four to six weeks to be approved.
Timelines for executing a DUA are unpredictable and depend on the speed with which your institution can process agreements or satisfy data security requirements, if necessary. It would be reasonable to plan for six months to execute an agreement.
Lag Time
Data is updated annually and is available midway through the following year, meaning 2018 data is available mid-2019.
Cost
Non-NJDOH principal investigators must pay a fee for IRB review ranging from $750-$1,800 depending on the level of review. There are additional fees for modification review, continuing review, and closure of studies ranging from $250-$750. The cost per data file is $5 per year of data.
Linking
NJ DOH will not link NJ hospital discharge data to study data on behalf of researchers. Instead, data is provided to researchers with identifiers, which can be used for linking to other data sources. The intent to link NJ hospital discharge data to other data should be made clear in the Rowan University IRB application, other IRB protocols that govern the research, and the DUA with NJ DOH. The exact linking process and available identifiers may vary according to the researcher’s DUA. Social Security numbers are not available for linking.
Identifiers Available for Linking
- Date of birth
- Gender
Data Contents
NJDDCS collects and combines utilization data from New Jersey hospitals, derived from hospital uniform billing information. This includes data on emergency department, inpatient, and outpatient utilization, organized at the visit level. See the data dictionary for more information on data elements and variables.
Partial List of Variables
Patient demographic information, discharge status, occurrence codes and dates, accident state, length of stay, admission and discharge date, hospital provider, bill and payment information (total charges for claim, payer codes, type of bill), insurance information, procedure and diagnostic codes, attending, operating, & referring physician identifiers.
J-PAL Randomized Evaluations Using this Data Set
Finkelstein, Amy, Annetta Zhou, Sarah Taubman, and Joseph Doyle. 2020. “Health Care Hotspotting – A Randomized Controlled Trial.” The New England Journal of Medicine 382 (January 9): 152-162. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1906848.