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

backgroundRates 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.

methodsFor 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.

resultsSome hospital characteristics, such as hospital peer group and proportion of total episodes that involve the specific procedure, showed associations for some procedures, but none were consistent across all eight procedures. We clustered hospitals into five groups, but low-value care rates did not differ much between these groups.

conclusionAvailable hospital variables show little association with rates of low-value care and no patterns across different low-value procedures. We need to investigate factors within hospitals, such as clinician knowledge and beliefs about low-value care.