Hospital service areas – a new tool for health care planning in Switzerland

Abstract

Background: The description of patient travel patterns and variations in health care utilization may guide a sound health care planning process. In order to accurately describe these differences across regions with homogeneous populations, small area analysis (SAA) has proved as a valuable tool to create appropriate area models. This paper presents the methodology to create and characterize population-based hospital service areas (HSAs) for Switzerland.

Evaluating and re-demarcating the Hospital Service Areas in Florida

“…Created by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (2014), Hospital Service Areas (HSAs) and Hospital Referral Regions (HRRs) have been increasingly used as analysis units in policy studies including the recent IOM (2013) report on healthcare spending. The HSAs are an area where most of local hospitalization occurs (Klauss, Staub, Widmer, & Busato, 2005). The HRRs are an aggregated level based on the HSAs, wherein patients are referred for major cardiovascular surgical procedures and for neurosurgery (Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences, 1999).…”

Creating a Geographical Information Systems-based Spatial Profile for Exploring Health Services Supply and Demand

“…GIS data visualization (Kaneko et al, 2003) and statistical techniques suggest that certain policy definitions of underserved areas may not be effective in defining areas of nursing shortages (Courtney, 2005). Klauss et al (2005), create and characterize population-based hospital service areas for Switzerland and visualize results as maps in a GIS. Hospital service areas and health utilization indices provide valuable information for health care planning.…”

Analyse der Hauptbehandlungskodierung der medizinischen Statistik für orthopädische Behandlungen mittels Spitaleinzugsgebieten (small area analysis)

“…Spitaleinzugsgebiete sind Aggregate von MedStat-Regionen, die aus mindestens einer MedStat-Region und einem Spital bestehen. Die Bildung dieser Gebiete beruht auf der Methode der «small area analysis» [2][3][4]. Einzugsgebiete widerspiegeln die effektive Nutzung stationärer Leistungen durch die Bevöl-ke rung im Zeitraum der Datenerhebung [5][6][7][8][9].…”