Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Utilization and Disparities of Acute Inpatient Care Across US Hospitals

This project will assess the extent to which non-COVID-19-related medical care and hospital revenue changed over time during the pandemic. Specifically, it will provide an assessment of changes in elective, nonelective, and emergent surgical procedures and medical admissions from March 2020 through the end of the first quarter of 2021 and compare these admissions to those in 2019. The project will examine whether outcomes varied for these procedures during the pandemic stratified by key patient characteristics (e.g., payer type, race, age, sex) and hospital characteristics (e.g., urban/rural, teaching hospital, safety net). It also will measure the changes in revenue experienced by different hospital types. Analyses for utilization will be conducted using the Premier Healthcare Database (PHD), a large U.S.-hospital-based, service-level, all-payer database that contains information on 45 percent of all U.S. hospital discharges from nearly 800 diverse hospitals. Vizient Clinical Database and Revenue files, another discharge-based, all-payer database, will be used to assess changes in hospital revenue.