Comparing Pregnancy and Childbirth-related Hospital Visits in Arizona Before and During COVID-19 Using Network Analysis

Jinhang Jiang, Karthik Srinivasan

Walmart International Technology, Bentonville AR, USA
School of Business, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS, USA

Cite: Jiang J., Srinivasan K. Comparing Pregnancy and Childbirth-related Hospital Visits in Arizona Before and During COVID-19 Using Network Analysis. J. Digit. Sci. 3(2), 37 – 52 (2021). https://doi.org/10.33847/2686-8296.3.2_2

Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe effect on all facets of human society, including healthcare. One of the primary concerns in healthcare is understanding and mitigating the impact of the pandemic on pregnancy and childbirth. While several studies have looked at challenges such as contract tracing of positive cases, predicting confirmed cases and deaths in individuals and communities, few studies have examined differences in hospitalization and treatment of pregnant mothers and infant care in large populations. In this study, the prevalence and co-occurrence of pregnancy and childbirth-related diagnoses reported in Arizona State hospitals for three sixth-month periods – before COVID-19 (second half of 2019), COVID-19 onset (first half of 2020), and COVID-19 (second half of 2020) are analyzed using network analysis. The results show that there are considerable differences in ego networks of few diagnoses during these time periods warranting further investigation into the causality of such population changes.

Keywords: Health analytics, Network analysis, Ego networks, Exploratory data analysis (EDA), COVID-19 data analysis, Pre-term and post-term conditions, Pregnancy and childbirth, Newborn diagnoses.

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Published online 28.12.2021