Small-Area Market Potential of Hospitals

Thomas M. Bryan, Third Wave Research

By analyzing annual hospital inpatient survey data, we can create propensity scores by age and sex for broad procedure categories by for each region of the United States. These scores may be joined with national household mailing lists (based on the attributes of the residents) then aggregated at very small levels of geography to assess hospital market potential and utilization rates. We found that by aggregating hospital services to 18 high-level hospital service lines, and stratifying patients into 69 age-sex categories, we are able to successfully calculate a series of patient propensity scores. These scores were used to rank patient likelihood for using hospital services, then were joined with a consumer household mailing list and tested against actual hospital inpatient data in North Carolina. The results showed that certain service lines propensity scores performed exceptionally well and warranted further study.