March 15, 2010

Characteristics of Weekday & Weekend Hospital Admissions, 2007

In this report for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, researchers Katheryn Ryan, M.P.H., Katharine Levit, and P. Hannah Davis, M.S., reviewed data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project for 2007 with the goal of highlighting differences between weekend and weekday hospital admissions. The information includes patient, hospital, and stay characteristics to provide an overview of differences. It does not adjust for severity of illness at admission. They found that mood disorders were among the top ten reasons in 2007 for weekend hospital admissions. Of the total 39.5 million people admitted to hospitals in 2007, about 774,000 of them were diagnosed with mood disorders; and of those, 19% were admitted on a weekend.