Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized in Rural and Urban ICUs From 2010 to 2019.

Objectives: Rural hospitals are threatened by workforce shortages and financial strain. To optimize regional critical care delivery, it is essential to understand what types of patients receive intensive care in rural and urban hospitals.

Design: A retrospective cohort study.

Setting and patients: All fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries in the United States who were 65 years old or older hospitalized in an ICU between 2010 and 2019 were included. Rural and urban hospitals were classified according to the 2013 National Center For Health Statistics Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties. Patient comorbidities, primary diagnoses, organ dysfunction, and procedures were measured using the International Classification of Diseases , 9th and 10th revisions diagnosis and procedure codes. Standardized differences were used to compare rural and urban patient admission characteristics.

Interventions: None.

Measurements and main results: There were 12,224,097 ICU admissions between 2010 and 2019, and 1,488,347 admissions (12.2%) were to rural hospitals. The most common diagnoses in rural hospitals were cardiac (30.3%), infectious (24.6%), and respiratory (10.9%). Patients in rural ICUs had similar organ dysfunction compared with urban hospitals (mean organ failures in rural ICUs 0.5, sd 0.8; mean organ failures in urban ICUs 0.6, sd 0.9, absolute standardized mean difference 0.096). Organ dysfunction among rural ICU admissions increased over time (0.4 mean organ failures in 2010 to 0.7 in 2019, p < 0.001).

Conclusions: Rural hospitals care for an increasingly complex critically ill patient population with similar organ dysfunction as urban hospitals. There is a pressing need to develop policies at federal and regional healthcare system levels to support the continued provision of high-quality ICU care within rural hospitals.