The Medicare COVID-19 Hospitalization Trends dataset contains aggregate information from Medicare Fee-for-Service claims, Medicare Advantage encounter, and Medicare enrollment data. It provides insight around the groups of beneficiaries that were hospitalized at different points during the pandemic. CMS publicly released the first Preliminary Medicare COVID-19 Snapshot in June 2020 during the early stages of the Public Health Emergency for COVID-19. That report focused on COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations data for Medicare beneficiaries with a COVID-19 diagnosis. Throughout 2020 and 2021, that report was subsequently updated with refreshed data 13 times. Beginning in October 2021, CMS shifted its public COVID-19 reporting away from cumulative case and hospitalization rates to hospitalization trends over time with the release of this report, the Medicare COVID-19 Hospitalization Trends Report. All prior releases of both the Preliminary Medicare COVID-19 Snapshot and the Medicare COVID-19 Hospitalization Trends Report are available for download in the Medicare COVID-19 Data - Prior Releases file.

With the onset of COVID-19, hospitals statewide saw a sharp drop in inpatient discharges, emergency department utilization, and ambulatory surgeries. These datasets contain monthly counts of encounters and in-hospital mortalities in those three settings and are also broken down by the following common health conditions/categories: anxiety, asthma, behavioral syndromes, cancer, cardiac arrest, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), COVID-19, depression, diabetes, homeless, hypertension, mood disorders (excluding depression), non-mood psychotic disorders, nonpsychotic disorders (excluding anxiety), obesity, pneumonia, respiratory arrest/failure, sepsis, stroke, substance use disorders, and unspecified mental disorders.