Abstract

During the past decade, many reforms were proposed and implemented for improving primary care in the US. This study assessed improvements in quality of primary care, using a nationally representative database. We conducted a retrospective trend analysis of National Inpatient Sample data (2007-2016). The quality of primary care was assessed using Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs), which consist of 13 sets of preventable hospitalization conditions. PQI hospitalization decreased from 154,565 to 151,168 per million hospitalizations during the study period (relative decrease, 2.2%; P = 0.041). Age-adjusted hospitalization rate increased for diabetes short-term complications (relative increase, 46.9%; P < 0.001) and lower-extremity amputations (relative increase, 15.1%; P = 0.035). Age stratified trends showed that hospitalization rates decreased significantly in all age-groups for diabetes short-term complications. For lower-extremity amputations, hospitalization rates increased significantly in younger age groups and decreased significantly in the older age groups. All other PQIs showed either decreasing or no change in trends. Adults aged 18-64 years should be the focus for future prevention attempts for diabetes complications. Identifying and acting on the factors responsible for these changes could help in reversing the concerning trends observed in this study. Existing strategies should focus on improving access to diabetes care and self-management.

Publication Date

2-7-2022

Content Type

Article

PubMed ID:

35132143

Comments

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licesse and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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