Garg N, Husk G, Nguyen T, Onyile A, Echezona S, Kuperman G, Shapiro J S
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Emergency Medicine , New York, New York, United States.
Mount Sinai - Beth Israel, Emergency Medicine , New York, New York, United States.
Appl Clin Inform. 2015 Mar 25;6(1):185-99. doi: 10.4338/ACI-2014-10-RA-0090. eCollection 2015.
Hospital closures are becoming increasingly common in the United States. Patients who received care at the closing hospitals must travel to different, often farther hospitals for care, and nearby remaining hospitals may have difficulty coping with a sudden influx of patients.
Our objectives are to analyze the dispersion patterns of patients from a closing hospital and to correlate that with distance from the closing hospital for three specific visit types: emergency, inpatient, and ambulatory.
In this study, we used data from a health information exchange to track patients from Saint Vincent's Medical Center, a hospital in New York City that closed in 2010, to determine where they received emergency, inpatient, and ambulatory care following the closure.
We found that patients went to the next nearest hospital for their emergency and inpatient care, but ambulatory encounters did not correlate with distance.
It is likely that patients followed their ambulatory providers as they transitioned to another hospital system. Additional work should be done to determine predictors of impact on nearby hospitals when another hospital in the community closes in order to better prepare for patient dispersion.
在美国，医院关闭变得越来越普遍。在关闭医院接受治疗的患者必须前往不同的、通常更远的医院就医，而附近剩余的医院可能难以应对患者的突然涌入。
我们的目标是分析来自关闭医院的患者的分布模式，并将其与距离关闭医院的距离相关联，以研究三种特定就诊类型：急诊、住院和门诊。
在本研究中，我们使用了来自健康信息交换的数据，追踪来自纽约市一家于2010年关闭的圣文森特医疗中心的患者，以确定他们在医院关闭后接受急诊、住院和门诊治疗的地点。
我们发现，患者在急诊和住院治疗时会前往最近的下一家医院，但门诊就诊与距离无关。
患者在转至另一个医院系统时可能会跟随他们的门诊医生。应该开展更多工作，以确定社区中另一家医院关闭时对附近医院影响的预测因素，以便更好地为患者分流做好准备。
