Linda H. Aiken, Ph.D., The Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing Professor of Sociology and Director, Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research University of Pennsylvania, PI of “Nursing Interventions to Reduce Disparities in Hospital Outcomes” (P30- NR05043), is the recipient of an administrative supplement under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) stimulus funding from NIH, National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). 

 The supplement seeks to extend the scope of the parent grant to create a new interdisciplinary collaboration with the Cartographic Modeling Laboratory (CML) and investigators in human geography and spatial analysis at the University of Pennsylvania and to apply a novel approach, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, to nursing outcomes research focused on reducing racial and ethnic disparities in hospital outcomes.   This work is motivated by recent research including our own suggesting that features of hospitals, as contrasted with individual characteristics of patients, are important determinants of racial and ethnic inequalities in outcomes of hospital care.  This project will explore further, and with more complete data than has been available previously, the effects of socioeconomic status of individual patients on outcomes as well as the compositional effects of aggregations of sub-groups of patients by hospital.