South Carolina Health Utilization Data
Clinical care and patient records data from licensed general acute care hospitals, emergency departments, and ambulatory care surgery centers in South Carolina. Includes inpatient discharge and outpatient encounter information.
Encounter visit records from licensed general acute care hospitals, emergency departments, and ambulatory care surgery centers in South Carolina.
Access
Encounter-Level data elements that contain individual patient-level data are available for general public release subject to an application and a data use agreement. Certain aggregate customized reports based on encounter-level data are available without a signed agreement. Restricted data elements include exact dates or times, patient ages, health care and patient identifiers, and zip codes. Researchers must receive approval for release through South Carolina’s Data Oversight Council (DOC) and must complete an application and confidentiality contract. The application documents and data use agreement are available on the Data Oversight Council homepage under documents and resources.
Personally identifiable information such as patient name, address, and Social Security number are considered confidential, and thus releasable only if a mandate has been established by statutory law, or never releasable. However, these data elements may be used for statistical linking performed by the Revenue and Fiscal Affairs office (RFA). For other questions, contact [email protected].
Timeline for Access
The time needed to access these data will vary depending on the security-level of the data and the data use agreements that need to be put into place. The linking process has been standardized and can usually be completed within 1-2 months.
Lag Time
RFA receives billing data on a monthly basis from hospitals throughout the state. The lag time for these data is six months for complete data, and four months for partially processed data.
Cost
RFA bills $90 an hour for staff effort to fulfill data requests. Costs will therefore vary based on the size and complexity of the request.
Linking
RFA will link on any of the identifiers listed below.
Identifiers Available for Linking
- Social Security number
- First name, last name
- Date of birth
Linking to Outside Data Sources
RFA maintains an integrated data system, including information about clients’ use of programs and services of various state, private and non-profit entities. The system enables researchers to analyze the use of services and client crossover among these entities. This includes data on legal and safety services, social services, behavioral health, child care, education, disease registries, Medicare, Medicaid, state employee health services, free clinics, community centers, and homelessness.
While RFA maintains these data and is able to link these data sets, each originating agency maintains control of its own data and dictates how they may be released. Many require additional, separate data use agreements, DOC approval, and IRB approval. Note that outside data sets are of variable quality across agencies.
Researchers who are interested in linking health utilization data to other datasets must first request permission from the DOC. If approved, the researcher must submit to RFA a key file containing study participants’ identifying information, and RFA will conduct a probabilistic match to link other data sets, after which researchers will receive de-identified, linked data.
Data Contents
The health data is separated into four categories based on accessibility: encounter-level, restricted, confidential and never releasable. Data classifications are reviewed periodically. Lists of variables are available online.
Partial List of Variables
Patient demographics, diagnosis codes, procedure codes, admission and discharge dates, hospital identifiers, charges for services by revenue center, length of stay, patient disposition
J-PAL Randomized Evaluations Using this Data Set
Baicker, Katherine, Mary Ann Bates, Margaret McConnell, Annetta Zhou and Michelle Woodford. "Randomized Evaluation of the Nurse Family Partnership in South Carolina." In Progress. 2022.
Other Research Using this Data Set
Health and Demographics, South Carolina Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office