Numerator
Number of cochlear implant surgeries in the U.S.
Denominator
Persons who are deaf or very hard of hearing
Methodology
A cochlear implant is a medical device that bypasses damaged structures in the inner ear and directly stimulates the auditory nerve, allowing some deaf stimulates the auditory nerve, allowing some deaf individuals to hear and to maintain or develop speech and language.
The numerator for this measure, number of cochlear implant (CI) surgeries, is derived from two databases in the HCUP system, because CI surgeries can be performed as inpatient surgeries or, increasingly, on an ambulatory basis in hospital-affiliated clinics. These databases are:
1) The Nationwide Inpatient Sample: The largest all-payer inpatient care database in the United States, which contains data on more than seven million hospital stays from approximately 1,000 hospitals. and
2) The State Ambulatory Surgery Databases (SASD): State databases that capture records from hospital-affiliated ambulatory surgery sites on surgeries performed on the same day in which patients are admitted and discharged.
CIs are coded in HCUP by ICD-9-CM procedure codes 20.96-20.98, which are used by all the hospitals or hospital-affiliated outpatient clinics included in HCUP.
Annual CI surgery data from Nationwide Inpatient Sample are available as nationally-weighted estimates from HCUP, and can be further classified by age categories, gender, and race.
Internally at AHRQ, as part of the HCUP project, hospital-affiliated ambulatory surgery data existed for 18 states in 2001 along with their inpatient discharge data.
References
Klein, R.J.; Proctor, S.E.; Boudreault, M.A.; Turczyn, K.M. Healthy People 2010 Criteria for Data Suppression. Statistical Notes No. 24. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2002.