SPARCS is a comprehensive all payer data reporting system established in 1979 as a result of cooperation between the healthcare industry and government. The system was initially created to collect information on discharges from hospitals. SPARCS currently collects patient level detail on patient characteristics, diagnoses and treatments, services, and charges for each hospital inpatient stay and outpatient (ambulatory surgery, emergency department, and outpatient services) visit; and each ambulatory surgery and outpatient services visit to a hospital extension clinic and diagnostic and treatment center licensed to provide ambulatory surgery services.
The Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) database was queried to investigate 30-day readmissions and prolonged length of stay (pLOS), for transsphenoidal pituitary surgery in New York from 1995 to 2015. Multivariate logistic regression, adjusting for patient and hospital characteristics, was performed to assess the effect of these variables on the outcomes of interest.