Hospital Costs Codebook
The data are for California hospitals for each quarter over the period 1991 to 1995. There is one observation for each hospital in each quarter. Each line is one observation. There are a total of 7535 observations.
The variables, from left to right are:
| Variable | Description | ||||||||
| HospID | The hospital's unique ID number | ||||||||
| Costs | The total operating expenditures incurred by the hospital in the quarter of this observation. | ||||||||
| Patient Days | The total number of "patient days" in this hospital in this quarter. This is a measure of how much care the hospital delivered to "inpatients" (people who stay overnight at least one night in the hospital). A person staying over two nights would add 2 patient days to this variable, for example. | ||||||||
| Visits | The total number of outpatient visits in this hospital in this quarter. This is a measure of how much care the hospital delivered to "outpatients" (people who come to the hospital, get treatment, and leave the same day). A visit to a hospital's clinic or emergency room would count as one visit (as long as the person did not end up staying in the hospital over night). | ||||||||
| Year | The year of the observation | ||||||||
| Quarter | The quarter of the observation:
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