Geographic Patterns of Stroke Hospitalizations among Medicare Beneficiaries

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

These maps represent stroke hospitalization patterns among Medicare beneficiaries, showing rates for the total population and for each racial and ethnic group; percentages of patients discharged to home and a skilled nursing facility; county locations of short-term general hospitals with emergency departments; and neurologists per 10,000 population aged 65 years and older in each county.

Each map has a chart of frequency distributions. The counties in all but two maps are categorized according to quintile; these two maps are categorized according to quartile. The darkest color represents counties with the highest rates or percentages, and the lightest color represents counties with the lowest rates or percentages. All county-level rates or percentages have been spatially smoothed to enhance the stability in counties with small populations. Counties are categorized as having “insufficient data” if the sum of stroke hospitalizations in the index county plus the neighboring counties is less than twenty or if the Medicare population is less than ten.

Courtesy of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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