Vohra and colleagues specifically investigate ICU "load imbalance," a phenomenon where some hospitals experience capacity constraints, while other hospitals in the same area have surplus capacity.
Vohra and colleagues find that between July 2020 and March 2022, more than half of the hospital referral regions (HRRs) included in their study experienced load imbalance, and that load imbalance peaked nationwide in September 2021.
They also find regional variation in load imbalance, determining that there was a higher proportion of HRRs with load imbalance in
the South than in the Midwest, West, and Northeast.
Additionally, load imbalance "disproportionately affected HRRs with a higher proportion of Black residents and hospitals with a higher proportion of Medicaid-enrolled and Black Medicare inpatients," suggesting that policies to better coordinate transfers between low- and high-burden hospitals could particularly impact these populations.
Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil interviews Julia Dennett from Yale University on her recent paper examining the impact that early OxyContin marketing in the 1990s had on the spread of infectious diseases twenty-five years later.
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