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Population Level Analysis of Acute Stroke Care Patterns in Hungary

Authors:
István Vassányi
Zsolt Vassy
Tamás Kováts
György Surján
Zoltán Nagy

Keywords: stroke care; patient pathways; clustering; clinical data analysis

Abstract:
Stroke is a global health challenge and it represents a significant economic and social burden. The treatment of stroke requires urgent and coordinated procedures. In this clinical data analysis study, our aim is to identify anomalies in the stroke care system. We analyze the stroke care patterns using case records of all 281,948 publicly financed cases between 2010 and 2017 in Hungary. The essence of the method is creating care events of some basic types, organizing event series into episodes, classifying episodes with respect to relevant care patterns, computing ‘spectra’ of episode type frequencies for the providers and forming clusters of the providers based on the correlations among their spectra. A similar method is applied for postal code areas. The results show that two clusters can be defined that divide the 61 clinics into a smaller and a larger cluster with significantly different care practices. The spatial analysis also revealed that the clusters of the postal code areas form geographically co-located patches marking anomalies in the stroke care system. The novelty of the paper is the proposed method and its application to stroke care. The findings may be used for quality management of the national stroke network.

Pages: 4 to 7

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2019

Publication date: September 22, 2019

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4553

ISBN: 978-1-61208-742-9

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from September 22, 2019 to September 26, 2019