Journal article
Using length of stay data from a hospital to evaluate whether limiting elective surgery at the hospital is an inappropriate decision
Journal of Clinical Anesthesia, Vol.16(6), pp.421-425
2004
DOI: 10.1016/j.jclinane.2003.11.003
PMID: 15567645
Abstract
At hospitals without detailed managerial accounting data but with overall longer than average diagnosis-related groups (DRG)-adjusted lengths of stays (LOS), some administrators do not aggressively hire the nurses needed to maintain surgical hospital capacity. The consequence of this (long-term) decision is that day-of-surgery admit cases are delayed or cancelled from a lack of beds. The anesthesiologists suffer financially. In this paper, we show how publicly released national LOS data can be applied specifically to these cases. We applied the method to 1 year of data from two academic hospitals. Each case's LOS was compared to the United States national average LOS for cases with the same DRG. A total of 8,050 and 10,099 hospitalizations, respectively. Among all surgical admissions, mean LOS was 2.5 days longer than the national average for Hospital #1 (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.1 to 2.8) and 3.1 days longer for Hospital #2 (95% CI, 2.8 to 3.4). Among patients undergoing elective, scheduled surgery with day of surgery admission, mean LOS was 0.7 days less than average for Hospital #1 (0.6 to 0.9) and 1.2 days less than average for Hospital #2 (1.1 to 1.4). This method can be used by anesthesiologists to show that LOS are not longer than average among patients whose surgeries may be cancelled or delayed for a lack of hospital ward staff.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Using length of stay data from a hospital to evaluate whether limiting elective surgery at the hospital is an inappropriate decision
- Creators
- Franklin Dexter - Department of Anesthesia, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USADavid A Lubarsky - Department of Anesthesiology, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of Clinical Anesthesia, Vol.16(6), pp.421-425
- Publisher
- Elsevier Inc
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.jclinane.2003.11.003
- PMID
- 15567645
- ISSN
- 0952-8180
- eISSN
- 1873-4529
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2004
- Academic Unit
- Health Management and Policy; Anesthesia
- Record Identifier
- 9983806397602771
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