OBJECTIVES: Our objective was to review, based on the official 2014 Colombian healthcare registry (known as RIPS), the crude figures of resource use (number medical consultations and hospitalizations) by age group. METHODS: The RIPS database provides demographic information (of which we used age and gender) of each patient’s contacts with the health system, on the number of hospitalizations, and on the length of stay (LOS). Based on DANE (the official Colombian statistics agency) we calculated the proportion of subjects in each age group that contacted the system on that particular year, the average number of contacts, hospitalization rate and average length of stay. RESULTS: According to RIPS 25,880,817 subjects (54.3% of Colombian population) contacted the health system in 2014, on average 12.2 times. Coverage was high in the first year of age (96% of population), reached its lowest point in the 10 to 14 year age group, and then rose consistently with age. The number of contacts, the hospitalization rate and the LOS increase with age (average LOS is around 5 days at ages 5 to 25, but then rises progressively, up to 11 days at age 80). An interesting finding was that according to DANE’s projections, based on the last census (in 2005) there should be 669,643 Colombians age 80 or more, and according to RIPS 921,727 contacted the health system in 2014. CONCLUSIONS: Our results give face validity to our RIPS information system and support its potential use both for research purposes and for decision making. Our health system has to be prepared for dealing with chronic conditions, with more comorbidities and with other characteristics of an older population. Additionally, our results suggest that the aging population process has been underestimated by our official statistics agency.