Automated delineation of hospital service areas as a new tool for health care planning.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

To develop an automated, reproducible method for delineating hospital service areas (HSAs).

Data sources/setting

Discharge data from all Swiss acute care hospitals for the years 2013 to 2016.

Study design

We derived HSAs and hospital referral regions for Switzerland using a newly developed flow-based, automated, objective, and reproducible method using all discharge data. We compared our method to the classical, partially subjective approach used to delineate the Swiss Health Care Atlas by delineating four sets of intervention-specific HSAs.

Principal findings

Based on 4 105 885 discharges, the fully automated method delineated 63 HSAs. Comparison with existing HSAs reveals good overlap and comparable measures of health utilization between the methods

SUBMITTER: Haynes AG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7240760 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature