People admitted to the hospital more often have higher morality rates-studies

Researchers looked at how often Medicare patients went to the hospital during their last six months. They found that a dying person in Hawaii spends an average of 16.4 days in the hospital versus 7.3 days in Utah. They also looked at the number of times Medicare patients went to the doctor during the last six months of life. New Jersey had the highest number of visits, 41.5. Again, Utah's Medicare patients tended to go to the doctor the least - 17 times. Researchers did not measure whether those who died in Utah got better or worse care than patients in New Jersey. But they did try to monitor care by following three types of patients for up to five years after they suffered a heart attack, a fractured hip, or a colectomy for colon cancer. For each illness, they found higher mortality rates for patients in the regions with the most intense care. Dr. John E. Wennberg, director of the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School, said the higher mortality rates in some regions could be caused in part by medical error. "There's a lot of concern about medical errors," Wennberg said. "If you hospitalize people twice as often in a community on a per capita basis, you have twice the risk of having a medical error problem."