Paper Title
Specialty Availability Predicts Interhospital Referral Pattern At A Metropolitan Community Hospital Emergency Room

Abstract
Community Hospital is the first line of defense to maintain the quality of primary health care, while transfer pattern is one of the potential indicators to assess the quality of a community hospital. However, specialty availability at the community hospital is incomplete, and emergency room transfer out frequently. Primary care quality needs may be strengthened. But none in the literature talks about the relationship between specialty availability and referral pattern in Community Hospital. The purpose of this paper is based on empirical data analysis of each specialty�s transfer out rate to make predictions on the studied community hospital emergency room�s overall referral pattern. Research method uses logic regression to predict degrees of impact on referral from each specialty regardless of availability. For statistics, the numbers of patients referred as well as hospitalized from the emergency room each month and also the specialties demanded are collected for a total of 1,624 samples between January and June of 2014. Empiric results suggest that there are still a few patients hospitalized for observation in specialties unavailable and ordinarily expected a referral from Community Hospital such as neurosurgery (NS), neurology (NEU) and infectious diseases (INF). This paper can be used as the basis for assessing the influence of other transfer reasons on emergency room referral patterns in the future. Index Terms� Community Hospitals,Emergency Room, Referral Pattern, Specialty Availability.