Hospital Referral Region (HRR)
A Hospital Referral Region (HRR) is a geographic area defined by the Dartmouth Atlas representing a regional market for tertiary medical care, used to analyze patient referral patterns, utilization variation, and resource allocation across markets.
What is a Hospital Referral Region (HRR)?
A Hospital Referral Region (HRR) is a geographic unit, defined by the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, that represents a regional market for major or tertiary medical care. Each region is drawn to capture where patients in an area actually travel for complex hospital services.
Because the boundaries are built from real referral and utilization patterns rather than political lines, HRRs reflect how care is genuinely organized across a region. This makes them a meaningful unit for studying healthcare markets.
How are Hospital Referral Regions used?
HRRs are widely used to analyze how patient referral patterns, service utilization, and resources vary from one regional market to another. They make it possible to compare areas on a consistent geographic basis and to spot variation that raw county or state lines would obscure.
For commercial and market-intelligence work, defining a market by its HRR helps frame questions about competition, demand, and where surgical or specialty volume concentrates. It provides a standardized lens for understanding the regional structure of care.
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