Profile of patients from a Veterans Administration medical center

Abstract

Data were analyzed to establish a general patient profile that could be the basis for specific profiles to be utilized for infectious disease and microbiologic studies. The analysis revealed that the average patient in this institution is a 57-year-old, white, married, Protestant man residing in Oklahoma.A personal-interview survey of 42 inpatients showed that 95 percent had smoked for a number of years, and of the smokers, 60 percent were current smokers while the remaining 40 percent had stopped smoking for at least one year. Primary treatment services were medicine (47.9 percent) and surgery (31.6 percent) with 7.4 percent of the patients treated on both of these services. The ten most common diagnostic-related groups for the medicine and surgery services are also noted.