Healthcare Resource Utilization and Epidemiology of Pediatric Burn-Associated Hospitalizations, United States, 2000

Abstract

Our study, “Healthcare Resource Utilization and Epidemiology of Pediatric Burn-Associated Hospitalizations, United States, 2000,” published in the Journal of Burn Care & Research, November/December 2007, is an analysis of the Kids' Inpatient Sample, a large, restricted access, publicly available dataset that is maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). One of the provisions of the Kids' Inpatient Sample data use agreement, which I signed when purchasing the dataset, is that no data involving ≤10 observations are to be published. This measure was put in place by AHRQ to protect individual patients' privacy and to prevent the potential disclosure of personal information. We were notified by AHRQ that our article violated this agreement by having some tabulated cells that contain ≤10 observations. This represents an oversight on my part and an inadvertent failure to comply with the data use agreement. For this, I apologize. Although I am fully confident that nothing in our article could be used to identify individuals or their personal information, the fact remains that the reporting of small numbers of observations is in violation of the AHRQ guidelines. The corrections are as follows.