A 12-Year Orthopedic Discharge Dataset from a County-Level Hospital in Jiangsu Province, China (2014–2025)
2026-08-19
This Data Descriptor presents 55,791 orthopedic inpatient discharge records from a county-level hospital in Jiangsu Province, China, collected between January 2014 and December 2025. Each record holds patient demographics, place of residence, up to five discharge diagnoses, up to three surgical procedures with their dates, length of stay, and total hospitalization cost. Because the source records were kept in Chinese, every categorical and clinical field (residence, department, sex, diagnoses, and procedures) was translated into standardized English terminology aligned with international classifications, so that the data can be read and reused without knowledge of Chinese. Care was delivered across five orthopedic units: three general orthopedic departments, a hand and foot surgery department, and a rehabilitation department. We checked every record for temporal consistency, for completeness of the core fields, and for agreement between surgical procedures and their recorded dates. County-level hospitals treat much of China’s rural population but remain under-represented in openly available clinical data: to our knowledge, no comparable long-term, patient-level orthopedic discharge dataset from a Chinese county-level hospital is currently accessible to researchers. The purpose of this work is therefore to make these otherwise unavailable records openly usable by the international research community, with the full translation of all clinical content into English as a central part of that contribution. The dataset is intended to support research on orthopedic epidemiology, healthcare utilization and cost, clinical pathways, and regional health-policy evaluation in that setting.