Data Source
The study was deemed exempt by the Rhode Island Hospital Institutional Review Board12. Data were obtained from the 2016 Nationwide Readmission Database (NRD), a publicly-accessible database that collects clinical, non-clinical, and procedural data for roughly 36 million yearly discharges, tracking both payers and the uninsured. The data is drawn from state-specific inpatient databases in order to generate approximations of national readmissions. The 2016 NRD database was created from 27 geographically dispersed states with verifiable patient linkage numbers, which were subsequently utilized to track patients across hospitals within a state while maintaining privacy through deidentification of patient information.