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.