Analysis of the hospital records from AOK Plus

TL;DR

This paper analyzes anonymized hospital admission and discharge data from German insurance records to understand healthcare transfer networks, which can inform models of disease spread and control strategies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of hospital transfer data, enabling the modeling of healthcare networks for infectious disease control.

Findings

Dataset properties are characterized and discussed.

Hospital transfer network structure is derived from the data.

Potential applications in modeling pathogen spread.

Abstract

We present analysis of anonymised admission/discharge data from insurance provider for Saxony and Thuringia (Germany) for years 2010--2016. Study of such data are necessary to derive a structure of healthcare system transfer network, as no patients' transfer data are currently available. Hospital network can be directly used as a basis for modelling of multidrug-resistant pathogen spread allowing to study the effectiveness of disease-control strategies. In this paper, the properties of the dataset under consideration are presented and discussed.