Healthcare Cost & Utilization Project (HCUP)

The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) is a growing family of health care databases and related software tools and products developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).  HCUP includes the largest collection of longitudinal hospital care data in the U.S. The HCUP databases and tools enable research on a broad range of health policy issues, including cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to health care programs, and outcomes of treatments at the national, state, and local market levels. HCUP is one of the growing number of accessible 'open data' resources.