Skip to contents

readHCUP

Overview

readHCUP makes it easy to read and work with datasets from Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). readHCUP’s functions are designed to work with the ASC files directly, so there is no need to preprocess the data for any of the supported datasets. The number of supported datasets is currently limited while the package is in beta, but more datasets will be added soon.

The currently supported datasets:

  • NIS 2016-2021

The current import method utilizes readr, and additional import functions (data.table, etc) will be added in the near future.

Please feel free to create an issue if you have any questions, feedback, or feature requests.

Installation

You can install the development version of readHCUP from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("jonbry/readHCUP")

Usage

Read NIS datasets 

library(readHCUP)

# The following uses an example NIS dataset

# Read theNIS dataset
df <- read_nis("inst/data/NIS_2019_test_data.ASC", 2019)

# Read only the first 5 observations
df_5 <- read_nis("NIS_2019_test_data.ASC", 2019, n_max = 5)

# Read in only the first three diagnostic codes (columns) of the first 10 observations
df_3dx <- read_nis("NIS_2019_test_data.ASC", 2019,
                   col_select = c("I10_DX1", "I10_DX2", "I10_DX3"),
                   n_max = 10)

Corrections

By default, the read_nis() automatically returns the corrected version of the data. For example, HCUP released a corrections for PCLASS_ORPROC in the NIS 2019 and 2020 datasets. Usually, you’d need download a csv file with the corrections and then update the values in the dataset. This can be a bit of a hassle when there are 7M+ records, so the corrections are automatically applied when using read_nis().

  • Note: In order for the corrections to be applied, KEY_NIS and PCLASS_ORPROC need to be included in your dataset. If they are not included, read_nis() will still return the data and you will receive a warning that corrections were not applied.

If you don’t want the corrections to be automatically applied, use corrected = FALSE:

# Read dataset the first 10 records of the dataset without corrections.
df <- read_nis("NIS_2019_test_data.ASC", 2019, n_max = 10, corrected = FALSE)

Supported datasets

The structure of the NIS dataset can change each year, which means read_nis() needs to be updated to support each NIS dataset. You can find a list of readHCUP’s supported datasets by running the following:

View(supported_datasets)

supported_datasets includes:

  • A data column is the name of the dataset and the year

  • A dataset_file_name column is the file name that was provided by the HCUP Central Distributor

Descriptions

The NIS dataset has over 150 variables, which are covered in detail on HCUP’s website. The descriptions() function allows you to get a list of all of the variable descriptions:

d_list <- descriptions(nis, 2019)
head(d_list)