A study on racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities with in-hospital mortality and length of stay of patients with congestive heart failure

Abstract

Each year, an estimated 17 million people worldwide die from cardiovascular disease. As one of the leading killers in the United States (1 in 4 die from this disease), it’s shown that over $109 billion dollars have been spent on healthcare costs alone. (WHO) This, combined with the fact that over half of the American population is at risk of cardiovascular disease is an important reason why the study of this disease is so vital. (CDC) This dissertation uses the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) to show the growing trends of treatment among healthcare providers with regards to factors like race, location of hospital, gender among others. We will show that while there are many non-medical factors that may influence the spread of this disease, there are also factors that may be controlled by the hospital itself in order to properly predict possible mortality among cardiovascular disease patients. What we have found is that there is are many non-medical factors that can increase and reduce the risk of in-hospital mortality. However, we have found that creating a viable model for length of stay with different independent variables was not as successful as the R 2 of the simple linear regression maxed out at 0.103. What this means is that our model does not fit perfectly. It can imply that some may be variables that don’t work well with each other, and other underlying reasons that may cause have caused the model to not fit perfectly. Additional research will have to be done to see how to make a model fit with simple linear regression of length of stay.