Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 50, Issue 2 S88-100, Copyright © 1995 by The Gerontological Society of America
Hospital utilization profiles among older adults over time: consistency and volume among survivors and decedents
FD Wolinsky, TE Stump and RJ Johnson
Department of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine, USA.
Medicare claims data are used to model hospital utilization patterns for
the 4,660 survivors and 2,867 decedents of the Longitudinal Study on Aging
(LSOA). When the volume of hospital utilization was collapsed into four
categories based on the mean annual number of hospital episodes and
consistency was defined as a maximum absolute deviation from that mean of
1.5 or less, 42.6 percent of the LSOA respondents were found not to have
any hospital admissions, and another 24.7 percent were found to be
consistently low users. Only 4.8 percent were consistently high users, with
an additional 6.8 percent being inconsistently high users. Multiple
regression identified prior physician and hospital utilization, as well as
poor perceived health, as the most important predictors of the volume and
consistency of hospital utilization among survivors, as well as of the
volume of hospital utilization among decedents. Among decedents,
consistency was primarily related to geographic region and prior physician
utilization.
