Summary
Background: 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.
Objectives: 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.
Methods: 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.
Results: We found that patients went to the next nearest hospital for their emergency and
inpatient care, but ambulatory encounters did not correlate with distance.
Discussion: 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.
Citation: Garg N, Husk G, Nguyen T, Onyile A, Echezona S, Kuperman G, Shapiro JS. Hospital
closure and insights into patient dispersion: the closure of Saint Vincent’s Catholic
Medical Center in New York City. Appl Clin Inf 2015; 6: 185–199
http://dx.doi.org/10.4338/ACI-2014-10-RA-0090
Keywords
Health information systems - health services research - health facility closure -
medical informatics - health policy
