An Analysis of 2015 Hospital Discharge Data
To asses cost of care for hospitals in New Hampshire, expense related metrics were created through summary and descriptive statistics for Inpatient and Outpatient Hospital Discharge Data. To create a schema that compares hospitals that are similar, data was gathered from the American Hospital Directory (AHD) website ("https://www.ahd.com).
The AHD provides data on over 7000 hospitals int he United States including key characteristics, services provided, utilization statistics, and financial information. Information including Available Beds, Gross Patient Revenue, Total Revenue, Total Number of Discharges and Type of Facility was compiled for each NH hospital. A correlation matrix was calculated to identify how correlated te hospital attributes were. Highly correlated attributes were dropped, and the following criteria were used to identify which hospitals are similar to each other based on the following attributes:
Available Beds, Total Revenue, Net Income, and Type of Facility (Short Term Acute Care or Critical Access).
K-Means Cluster Analysis was completed. A K of 3 was chosen, which will cluster the 26 hospitals into three distinct groups.
New Hampshire Hospital Discharge Data (HDD) was used for the analysis. HDDcontains inpatient and outpatient hospital discharge data
that is collected and reported to the NH Department of Health and Human Services.
HDD contains patient-level discharge information from all hospitals licensed in
New Hampshire. HDD is a publicly available dataset used by public health officials and health care planners for the purposes of
assessing hospital utilization as well as the incidence and burden of disease and injury among New Hampshire residents.
There are 26 Short Term Acute Care and Critical Access Hospitals in the state of New Hampshire.
According to 2010 Census Bureau data, the population of New Hampshire is around 1.3 million residents.
There was a total of 126,504 Inpatient discharges across all New Hampshire hospitals in 2015.
There was a total of 2,850,387 outpatient discharges across all New Hampshire hospitals in 2015.
Outpatient encounters include emergency department, diagnostic, laboratory, therapeutic, and observational records.