TITLE:
Evaluating Hospital Inpatient Discharges at the Regional Level
AUTHORS:
Ronald Lagoe, Shelly Littau
KEYWORDS:
Hospitals, Hospital Utilization, Health Planning
JOURNAL NAME:
Case Reports in Clinical Medicine,
Vol.8 No.4,
April
9,
2019
ABSTRACT: Historically, the evaluation of hospital utilization in the United States
has been addressed by providers and health planning agencies. This study
evaluated resident inpatient hospital discharges for adult medicine and adult
surgery in the Central New York Health Service Area, an eleven county region of
upstate New York. It focused on small local hospitals and larger referral
center hospitals in the region. The study demonstrated that numbers of adult
medicine resident discharges from small local hospitals declined by 17.3
percent in most counties of the region between 2012 and 2017. This reduction
resulted, in part, from the implementation of medical observation programs that
shifted many patients with low severity of illness to outpatient status. The
study also demonstrated that numbers of adult surgery resident inpatient
discharges from small local hospitals declined by 15.8 percent. This resulted
from the inmigration of many surgical patients from these providers to larger
hospitals in the region. The study suggested that there may not be sufficient
inpatient adult surgery and medicine volumes to support the current number of
hospitals in the region.