According to a research brief released by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), 12.7% or about 1 in 8 hospitalizations for Pennsylvania residents were potentially preventable in FY 2017. Statewide there were 171,211 potentially preventable hospital admissions in FY 2017, totaling 775,251 hospital days and an estimated $1.2 billion in hospital payments. The good news is that the rate of potentially preventable hospitalizations decreased 28% between FY 2008 and FY 2017, from 220.9 to 158.2 admissions per 10,000 Pennsylvania residents. Using a set of Prevention Quality Indicators developed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), PHC4 identified hospital admissions for select conditions that might have been prevented with access to effective primary or preventive care—thereby avoiding the need for a more expensive hospital stay. Heart failure was the condition with the highest number of potentially preventable hospitalizations. At 49,888 admissions, heart failure encompassed 29.1% of the potentially preventable hospitalizations in FY 2017. COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) or asthma in residents age 40 and older was the second highest condition at 37,619 admissions.
Read more:
- Research Brief: Potentially Preventable Hospitalizations in Pennsylvania. PHC4. April 2018. (PDF)
- Related news release: http://www.phc4.org/reports/researchbriefs/hospitaladmissions/17/nr042518.htm