Co-ordination of health care: the case of hospital emergency admissions

The recognition that chronic care delivery is suboptimal has led many health authorities around the world to redesign it. In Norway, the Department of Health and Care Services implemented the Coordination Reform in January 2012. One policy instrument was to build emergency bed capacity (EBC) as an integrated part of primary care service provided by municipalities. The explicit aim was to reduce the rate of avoidable admissions to state-owned hospitals. Using five different sources of register data and a quasi-experimental framework—the “difference-in-differences” regression approach—we estimated the association between changes in EBC on changes in aggregate emergency hospital admissions for eight ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSC). The results show that EBC is negatively associated with changes in aggregate ACSC emergency admissions. The associations are largely consistent with alternative model specifications. We also estimated the relationship between changes in EBC on changes in each ACSC condition separately. Our results are mixed. EBC is negatively associated with emergency hospital admissions for asthma, angina and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease but not congestive heart failure and diabetes. The main implication of the study is that EBC within primary care is potentially a sensible way of redesigning chronic care.