Urban-Rural Definitions

How do you define if an area is rural? A paper by Bennett et al. (2019) provides some options. Population density. This is one of the simplest approaches and can be applied to any geographic unit. However, it may be problematic for geographic units with a mix of urban and rural sections. MSA-based. The Office…

Diagnostic Ability and Quality of Care

Quality of care often is seen as how physicians and other health care providers treat patients with a given disease.  Accurately diagnosing the disease a patient has, however, is in almost all cases a necessary condition to provide high-quality treatment.  Nevertheless, a physician’s ability to accurately diagnose a disease is rarely measured within exsting quality…

EMR Adoption: Not what you might expect

Are urban or rural physician practices more likely to adopt electronic medical records (EMR)?  The answer is suprrising.  A paper by Whitacre (2016) finds the following: Overall practice-level EMR adoption rates generally increase with the degree of rurality and range from 47 percent in the most urban counties to over 60 percent in the most…

How useful are health rankings?

According to an HSR editorial by Stephan Arndt, the answer is not very.  Generally, county level health rankings are too variable to be of much use.  Further, while some metropolitan regions may have large sample sizes, the sample sizes in less densely populated rural counties will be far lower leading to less precise estimates of any…