With a nod to the power of statistics, the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) recently compiled a report depicting patient characteristics or traits it found to be common among the nation’s homeless.
HCUP, a consortium of health care databases, software platforms and products provided by the U.S. government in partnership with states and industries and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), found that homeless persons are more likely to utilize emergency services than others and visit hospitals more frequently, a posting on the AHRQ website said. The study also found that Medicaid emerged as the most often-used payer.
The report broke down data by several categories, such as teaching hospitals versus nonteaching hospitals, admissions versus treat-and-release cases and reasons for emergency visits, the posting said.
Using administrative clinical and nonclinical data at the encounter level, HCUP assembled comprehensive information relating to diagnoses, procedures, inpatient stays, ambulatory surgery, patient demographics, discharge status, charges, and emergency room events, the posting said.
