Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2015
Abstract
Objectives: Due to the escalating healthcare expenditure and the number of hospitalizations, it is becoming increasingly important for healthcare organizations to evaluate the cost and improve the quality and efficiency of treatment.
Method: We deploy neural networks to examine the strategic association between hospitalization experience and treatment results. The healthcare data for the years 2009-2012 are downloaded from the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) of the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH). We operationalize the hospitalization experience using the indicators facility ID, procedure description, type of admission, patient disposition upon discharge, APR severity of illness, source of payment, and age group; and the treatment result using indicators hospital length of stay and APR risk of mortality
Results: Our findings show that there are significant differences in length of stay and mortality rates depending on the treatment procedure. Treatment result shows a strong association with procedure and with the patients’ disposition upon discharge. Interestingly, under similar health conditions, patients who are under the public healthcare system tend to have longer length of hospital stays than others.
Conclusions: We offer a portfolio of factors to be considered in evaluating patient health outcomes from hospitalization. We emphasize the need for efficient utilization of investment in healthcare, be it public or private.
Comments
This article was originally published in the Journal of Health & Medical Informatics, available at DOI: 10.4172/2157-7420.1000209 .
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.