ASA’s Health Policy Research (HPR) tracks health care trends relevant to anesthesiology. We maintain data sets with a broad array of data elements such as procedure volumes, health care costs and facility characteristics across a range of health care settings. One such data set is the Annual Hospital Survey from the American Hospital Association (AHA), which recently released data from 2013. In this “Policy Matters,” we compare 2013 with 2011 AHA data and examine trends in surgical volumes for the three-year period. These data represent hospitals that reported at least one surgical operation in either year.
Exhibit 1 (next page) shows the distribution of total and inpatient surgical operations by state – 2013 and change from 2011.
Exhibit 2 (page 12) is the dependency curve between the percentages of 2013 hospitals and surgical volume. It is very similar to the 2011 dependency curve (not shown), illustrating that most surgical procedures...
