Beginning in 2000, KID weights calculations were changed in order to make national estimates of the number of discharges more accurate:

• Rehabilitation hospitals were excluded from the KID hospital universe and sample.
• American Hospital Assocation hospital unit discharges were used instead of total facility discharges, which include nursing home unit discharges.

In order to facilitate analysis of trends using multiple years of KID data, an alternate set of KID discharge weights for the 1997 HCUP KID were developed. These alternate weights were calculated in the same way as the weights for the 2000 and later years of the KID. The KID Trends Report (PDF file, 365 KB) includes details regarding the alternate weights and other recommendations for trends analysis.

These alternate weights are available for download in a self-extracting PKZIP compressed ASCII file along with SAS and SPSS load programs, as listed below:

To extract the ASCII file, run the KID_1997_CORE_TrendWt.exe file as follows:

• Type the file name within DOS or click on the name within Windows Explorer.
• Edit the name of the "Unzip To Folder" in the WinZip Self Extractor dialog to select the desired destination directory for the extracted file.
• Click on the "Unzip" button.

The ASCII file contains the following two data elements:

The alternate discharge weights may be merged onto the original 1997 KID Core Inpatient File by RECNUM.