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Friday, April 25, 2014

How do rural and urban hospital patients differ?

A report released this week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examines the differences between rural and urban hospitals, comparing data from 2010 for in areas such as the number of procedures, types of diagnoses, length of hospital stays, average age of patients and percent of patients covered by the federal-state Medicaid program. (CDC graphic)

"Rural hospitals provided 11 percent of all 168 million hospital days of care and just 6 percent of the 51 million nonsurgical and surgical inpatient procedures performed," Megan Brooks reports for Medscape. Rural hospitals had 51 percent of inpatients, compared to 37 percent of urban ones, and 52 percent of rural patients used Medicaid as their principal source of payment, compared to 42 percent of urban patients.

"For first-listed diagnoses, childbirth, cancer, and poisonings were relatively more common among urban hospital inpatients, whereas dehydration, bronchitis, and pneumonia were frequent among rural hospital inpatients," Brooks writes. Rural and urban hospitals had similar numbers in several factors, including the average number of diagnoses (7.9 to 7.4), average lengths of stay (about 4.5 days and 4.8 days), proportions of inpatients on Medicaid (15 percent and 18 percent), and the percentage who died before discharge, with both reporting 2 percent.

Almost twice as many surgical procedures were performed in urban hospitals for inpatients, with 62 percent of urban patients receiving surgery, compared to 36 percent of rural ones, Brooks writes. Urban inpatients "were more than twice as likely to have 3 or more procedures performed than rural hospital inpatients." After leaving the hospital, 7 percent of rural inpatients were transferred to another facility, compared to 3 percent of urban ones. (Read more)

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