Can diabetes patients seeking a second hospital get better care? Results from nested case-control study

This study investigates the effects of the number of medical institutions visited on risk of death. This study conducted a nested case-control design using the National Health Insurance Service-Senior database from 2002 to 2013. Cases were defined as those with death among outpatients who had first diagnosis of diabetes mellitus (E10-E14) after entry into the base cohort and controls were selected by incidence density sampling and matched to cases based on age, and sex. Our main results were presented by conditional logistic regression for nested case-controls design. Of total 55,558 final study samples, there were 9,313 (16.8%) cases and 46,245 (83.2%) controls. With an increase by one point in the number of hospitals per medical utilization, risk of death significantly increased by 4.1% (odds ratio (OR): 1.041, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.039-1.043). In both medical utilization and number of hospitals, those with high medical utilization (OR: 1.065, 95% CI: 1.059-1.070) and number of hospitals (OR: 1.049, 95% CI: 1.041-1.058) for risk of death were significantly higher than those with low medical utilization (OR: 1.040, 95% CI: 1.037-1.043) and number of hospitals (OR: 1.029, 95% CI: 1.027-1.032), respectively. The number of medical institution visited was significantly associated with risk of death. Therefore, diabetics should be warned about the potential of risk of death incurred from excessive access to medical utilizations.