Hospital characteristics associated with low-value care in public hospitals in New South Wales, Australia.

Abstract

Background Rates of low-value care vary between hospitals in New South Wales, Australia. Understanding factors associated with this variation will help in understanding the drivers of low-value care and in planning initiatives to reduce low-value care. Methods For eight low-value procedures, we used Poisson regression of the number of low-value episodes at each hospital to assess the association between low-value care and hospital characteristics. We also used hierarchical clustering on the low-value procedures used and their rates at each hospital to try to identify groups of hospitals with higher or lower rates of low-value care across multiple procedures. Results Some hospital character..