Special report: mining admissions data. Benchmarking hospital admission rates by ages

In this second part of our two-part series on mining hospital admissions data, Ronald Lagoe, executive director of the Hospital Executive Council, a four-hospital system in Syracuse, NY shows how admissions data readily available from various state agencies can be analyzed for patterns by age groups. As he points out below, this information will be particularly valuable as Medicare managed care takes over. For a discussion of data sources, methodology and analysis, see part one, beginning on p. 81 of the June Healthcare Benchmarks.