SAN FRANCISCO — Children who live in neighborhoods that are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are at significantly greater risk for being admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and of dying there, a study of Medicaid data showed.
Among more than 4 million children and adolescents in 12 US states, those in the most socioeconomically deprived quartile had a significantly higher risk for PICU admission and in-hospital death compared with patients from the least-deprived areas.
Black children were also at significantly higher risk for death than children of other races, reported Hannah K. Mitchell, BMBS, MSc, from Evelina Children's Hospital, in London, United Kingdom. "I think we need to do better work for trying to understand the mechanisms behind these disparities, and whether they can be intervened over in a hospital setting, and to try to identify targeted interventions," she said during a presentation at the American Thoracic Society International Conference 2022.
Medicaid Data
During her residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Mitchell and colleagues conducted a study to determine whether there were disparities in PICU admissions and mortality according to socioeconomic deprivation in specific neighborhoods.
They created a retrospective cohort study of Medicaid patients from birth to age 20 who were covered from 2007 through 2014 in 12 US states, using ZIP codes to identify areas of social deprivation.
