Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) Database

The NEDS data dictionary can be found here.

Type of Data

Specialty/Emergency department database

Years Available

2006-2022
Note: At OSU, we have 2009-2016 available through the CATALYST Data Core

Short Description

Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) is powerful database designed to support different types of analyses involving all-payer hospital-owned emergency department visits. NEDS is a part of family of databases and software tools developed for the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). More details about NEDS can be found at their fast-facts website.

Strengths

  • Unweighted, NEDS contains about 30 million ED visits annually
  • Weighted, it approximates 145 million ED visits
  • NEDS contains information on patients initially seen in the ED and subsequently admitted to the same hospital or ED visits that do not result in an admission
  • NEDS database contains four discharge-level files and one hospital-level file
  • The data are well formatted and maintained with data dictionaries, including programs for loading CSV files into SAS, SPSS or Stata

Limitations

  • Supplemental Inpatient File (one of discharge-level files) contains data elements that are specific to the inpatient stay. Procedure codes that are included in this file may been performed in the ED but currently there is no way to verify this information
  • Diagnosis and Procedure Groups File is available beginning with data year 2018

SDC Members with Expertise

  • No one at this time