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Linking Patients to Hospital
- Source :
- Medical Care. 31:YS6-YS15
- Publication Year :
- 1993
- Publisher :
- Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health), 1993.
-
Abstract
- Small area analysis is a widely used approach for identifying variations in the delivery of health services across geographically defined populations. There is growing consensus that, to a significant degree, these variations reflect the practice style of different physicians at area hospitals. However, to date, small area analysis has not been appropriate for studying the practice style of physicians at individual urban hospitals. This occurs, at least in part, because urban residents have easy geographic access to several hospitals, and no clear method of assigning small geographic areas to a single hospital is available. This study addresses this issue by taking a new approach to defining urban hospital service areas. As gate keepers to hospitals, physicians tend to admit their patients to one or two institutions. Therefore, urban hospital service areas are defined by ignoring geographic boundaries and linking patients to a single hospital on the basis of the admitting patterns of the physicians the patient contacts. The sensitivity of the assignment rules is tested; the results of the proposed technique are compared with those using a traditional geographic approach. The findings of the study reported here suggest that this is a feasible method, which yields stable sensitivity results and is generalizable to a variety of urban settings.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
medicine.medical_specialty
Urban Population
MEDLINE
Sensitivity and Specificity
Health services
Hospitals, Urban
Patient Admission
Catchment Area, Health
medicine
Humans
Practice Patterns, Physicians'
Small-Area Analysis
Aged
Service (business)
Practice patterns
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Manitoba
Middle Aged
Geography
Evaluation Studies as Topic
Family medicine
Female
Catchment area
Urban hospital
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 00257079
- Volume :
- 31
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Medical Care
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....b61693aa7e5b6cc3d87d104ad54b1fbc