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Study: Rural Sites Can Handle Heart Attack

Posted on: Thursday, 5 April 2007, 15:00 CDT

Rural hospitals might not provide worse heart attack care than urban hospitals after all, a new U.S. study says.

A study of 119 urban and rural hospitals in Iowa found that there was no difference in the death rate after a heart attack -- contrary to previous research.

Researchers arrived at the new finding by using a more sensitive method of analysis that took into account that fact that sicker heart attack patients tend to stay at rural hospitals, while healthier ones are transported to urban hospitals for treatment, according to the study by University of Iowa researchers appearing in the March/April issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.

The older approaches did not take certain biases, or confounding factors, into consideration, and so comparing rural to urban hospitals was like comparing apples to oranges, said lead author Paul James, head of family medicine at the University of Iowa college of medicine.

We used an approach that allowed us to study patients that were comparable who attended rural and urban hospitals, he said.

The article used year 2002 and 2003 Iowa State Inpatient Datasets, which included information on 12,191 admissions for people age 18 older diagnosed primarily with a heart attack.

Source: United Press International

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