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State Health Compare

Per person costs of potentially preventable hospitalizations

Measure Overview

Hospitalizations contribute substantially to health care costs, with spending on hospital care reaching $1.3 trillion in 2020, accounting for 31.1% of overall health care spending—a growth of 6.4% from 2019. Potentially preventable hospitalizations are hospital visits that research suggests could have been avoided with better access to high-quality outpatient care, such as care provided in doctor's offices, clinics or other settings outside the hospital.

State Heath Compare presents national and state-level estimates of per person costs of potentially preventable hospitalizations using data from the Health Care Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). HCUP is a collection of national and state inpatient and emergency department databases developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Estimates are available for a number of years, but users should note that a break in data series occurred in 2016 due to a switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 codes.

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