An alterative method for hospital partition determination using hierarchical cluster analysis.
The classification of short-term hospitals into homogeneous groups has become an integral part of many systems designed to abate continuing cost inflation in the hospital industry. This paper describes one approach which was developed to identify homogeneous groups of short-term hospitals. The approach, based on hierarchical cluster analysis, defines an objective measure (called expected distinctiveness) to evaluate any group of hospitals identified by a hierarchical grouping structure or dendrogram. Using this measure, an efficient algorithm is developed which finds the hospital partition from the identified groups which maximizes total expected distinctiveness. A numerical example illustrates the application and extensions.
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002391:Catchment Area, Health; D006761:Hospitals / Q000145:classification*; D011445:Prospective Payment System; D011907:Rate Setting and Review; D013029:Space-Time Clustering; D014481:United States