Number of Inpatient Admissions Related to News, Weather, Pollution, Economy

• Activity Number: 675
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 5, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Ronald Bruce Low*+ and Shunsuke Ito and Caroline Jacobs and Van H. Dunn and David A. Dickey and Raymond Gregory and Leonard Bielory
• Companies: New York City Health and Hospitals and New York City Health and Hospitals and New York City Health and Hospitals and MetroPlus/New York City Health and Hospitals and North Carolina State University and New York City Health and Hospitals and Rutgers University
• Keywords: Hospital Admissions ; Weather ; Allergens ; Unemployment ; Pollution ; Fungi

Abstract

Hospital beds are an expensive, limited resource. To help planners anticipate, we modeled relationships between numbers of hospital admissions and: weather, pollution, URI incidence, airborne allergens, census, unemployment, the 9/11/2001 attack, 8/14/2003 blackout, and days that the NY Times carried stories about H1N1. We used ARIMA modeling with day as the unit of time. Results: Our 11 hospitals admitted 645+-46 patients/day on workdays and 454 +-33 on weekends and holidays(p< .0001). We found several weekly and yearly effects, and independent effects of the blackout (65 extra visits, p=.027), fungal spore count, URI incidence, NO2 levels, air temperature, relative humidity, and U6 unemployment. Adjusted for these, we did not find statistically significant independent effects other pollutants, airborne allergens, unemployment statistics, the 9/11 attack or H1N1 stories.