The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) has published a new set of County-Level Utilization Reports today, displaying the overall total number of ambulatory/outpatient cases and inpatient hospitalizations for Pennsylvania residents. This latest release reflects data from Quarter 1 of 2025.

The reports display data from acute care, long-term acute care, rehabilitation, psychiatric, and specialty hospitals, as well as hospital outpatient departments and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers in Pennsylvania. Barry D. Buckingham, PHC4’s Executive Director, believes these quarterly County-Level Utilization Reports are amongst the most easily consumed data in the Commonwealth. “Offering this amount of data in an easy-to-read report allows stakeholders to quickly analyze and allocate resources, assuring efficiency and effectiveness,” said Buckingham. He went on to say that PHC4 aims to continue to serve its mission of empowering Pennsylvanians through transparency and fostering a data-driven approach to health care.

These County-Level Utilization Reports are invaluable tools for local communities, health care professionals, and policymakers. By fostering a data-driven approach to health care, PHC4 envisions a healthier, more resilient society where resources are allocated effectively, and lives are improved. PHC4 invites all stakeholders to review these reports, available now at phc4.org. These timely reports are updated every quarter and show the number of cases for each county, with breakouts by patient age, sex, and payer.

PHC4 is an independent council formed under Pennsylvania statute (Act 89 of 1986, as amended by Act 15 of 2020) in order to address rapidly growing health care costs. PHC4 continues to produce comparative information about the most efficient and effective health care to individual consumers and group purchasers of health services. In addition, PHC4 produces information used to identify opportunities to contain costs and improve the quality of care delivered.

For more information, visit phc4.org or access the reports here.

new report examines the occupational exposure to artificial intelligence (AI) in the metropolitan areas of Delaware, southern New Jersey, and eastern and central Pennsylvania.

The study focuses on identifying which jobs are most exposed to AI, meaning how much AI could enhance or automate their tasks. Here are some key findings:

• The median AI exposure across all occupations in these areas is .307, indicating that about 31 percent of tasks in these jobs are affected by AI.
• Jobs requiring higher education and offering higher salaries are more likely to be affected by AI.
• However, higher exposure doesn’t necessarily mean job losses. AI could potentially boost productivity and wages in some fields.

Click here to read the report.

Parents ensure their newborn gets care, but may neglect their own health, a new LDI study confirms.

Rural parents, in particular, had more hospitalizations and acute care visits and faced more problems getting postpartum obstetric or gynecological care than their urban peers. But parents’ health fared worse than their infants across the board.

“People naturally prioritize their infant’s health,” said LDI Senior Fellow Sara Handley, who led the study. “But parents need to be in good physical, mental, emotional, and financial health to fully care for their babies.”

Pediatric visits may be an opportunity to improve care for postpartum parents, the study suggests. Using an innovative approach that studied parents and infants together, based on evidence of their interrelated health, Handley, LDI Senior Fellow Emily Gregory, and colleagues found that babies had better health than their parents. These findings support the integration of parental care with infant visits.

Study Finds Rural-Urban, Parent-Infant Differences

The study used 2006–2018 data from the National Health Interview Survey, a key public data source for understanding the U.S. maternal health crisis. Since 1957, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has conducted the survey to improve the health of Americans.

The data included self-reported information on more than 4,000 rural-residing and more than 25,000 urban-residing parents and infants. The researchers compared rural and urban groups of parents and infants in terms of health status, care utilization, and barriers to care. They also examined rural-urban differences in parent-infant units.

Read the full report.

See what’s happening with consumer debt in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania as of early 2025 with five briefs.

Each brief focuses on a different type of debt:

1. Total debt
2. Auto debt
3. Credit card debt
4. Home loans
5. Student loan debt

The briefs use data from the Consumer Credit Explorer, a user-friendly online tool that allows you to look at quarterly trends for the whole country, specific states, or regions.

Read more.

Caregivers have higher well-being in urban areas, where more support is available, than those in suburban or rural areas, according to a new study.

Roughly a quarter of adults in the U.S. are caring for elderly family members or children with an illness or disability — and sometimes both at the same time. Despite family caregiving consuming time and resources for both individuals and governments, social scientists don’t fully understand how it affects the people who do the caregiving, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State. In collaboration with colleagues at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota, the researchers conducted an expansive study of caregiver well-being, finding that the type of geographic location and individual circumstances can impact a caregiver’s health, comfort and happiness even more than their state’s family care policies.

In findings recently published in Rural Sociology, the researchers reported that rural and suburban caregivers were more likely to have low or medium well-being, and less likely to have high well-being compared to urban caregivers. And caregivers’ personal characteristics — such as age, income and education — had a stronger effect on their well-being than the family care policies of the state they live in. However, the researchers concluded, family-care policies can make a difference in well-being when they take into account the differences among rural, suburban and urban areas — especially in terms of available support and infrastructure.

Read more.

The Childhood Begins at Home campaign released new fact sheets that show the number of young children and their families receiving publicly funded, evidence-based home visiting services statewide in Pennsylvania and in each county.

However, consistent with stagnant funding for home visiting in the state budget since 2023, no growth has occurred in the level of services statewide, with the number remaining at just 7% of low-income families who receive home visiting services.

The campaign, which includes all eight evidence-based home visiting programs that receive public funding*, will continue to educate policymakers about the many proven benefits Pennsylvania families receive, including improved child & maternal health, safety, school readiness, child development, family stability, and community connections. Together, they will seek a pathway to expand these life-changing services to reach more families affected by economic and social disparities in the coming year.

*LEARN MORE about the eight home visiting programs in the campaign – Child First, Early Head Start, Family Check-Up®, Family Connects, Healthy Families America, Nurse-Family Partnership, Parents as Teachers, and SafeCare Augmented® – through these additional campaign resources:

• Mapping Home Visiting in PA
• Home Visiting Works: Model Outcomes