Association of distance between hospitals and volume of shared admissions

BMC Health Services Research

Research

Howard H. Chang¹  Sara D. Turbow²  Teg Uppal³  Mohammed K. Ali⁴ 

[1] Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, USA;Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Emory University, 49 Jesse Hill Jr Dr SE, 30303, Atlanta, GA, USA;Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA;Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA;Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA;Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA;

关键词: Readmission;    Care fragmentation;    Health information exchange;    Healthcare market;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12913-022-08931-1

 received in 2022-05-03, accepted in 2022-12-05,  发布年份 2022

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundTo assess whether decreasing distance between hospitals was associated with the number of shared patients (patients with an admission to one hospital and a readmission to another).MethodsData were from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s State Inpatient Databases (Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Utah [2017], New York, Vermont [2016]) and the American Hospital Association Annual Survey (2016 & 2017). This was a cross-sectional analysis of patients who had an index admission and subsequent readmission at different hospitals within the same year. We used unadjusted and adjusted linear regression to evaluate the association between the number of shared patients and the distance between admission-readmission hospital pairs.ResultsThere were 691 hospitals in the sample (247 in Florida, 151 in Georgia, 50 in Maryland, 172 in New York, 58 in Utah, and 13 in Vermont), accounting for a total of 596,772 admission-readmission pairs. 32.6% of the admission-readmission pairs were shared between two hospitals. On average, a one-mile decrease in distance between two hospitals was associated with of 3.05 (95% CI, 3.02, 3.07) more shared admissions. However, variability between states was wide, with Utah having 0.37 (95% CI 0.35, 0.39) more shared admissions between hospitals per one-mile shorter distance, and Maryland having 4.98 (95% CI 4.87, 5.08) more.ConclusionsWe found that proximity between hospitals is associated with higher volumes of shared admissions.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2022

【 图 表 】

Fig. 6