Geographic variations in Medicare utilization of short-stay hospital services, 1981-88

The change in Federal fiscal year 1984 from cost-based reimbursement to prospective payment at a fixed price for a known and defined product--the hospital stay--represents a fundamental change in the role of the Medicare program within the health care delivery system. In this article, national and selected geographic trends in Medicare short-stay hospital inpatient discharges since 1981 are presented, and they show the impact of the implementation of the prospective payment system.     

Predicting length of stay for Medicare patients at a teaching hospital.

This research examines how the patients' characteristics and clinical indicators affect length of stay for the top five Diagnosis-Related-Groups (DRGs) for Medicare patients at a teaching hospital in the United States. The top DRGs were selected on the basis of volume per year. Teaching hospitals in the United States devote a significant amount of their resources to research and teaching, while providing treatment for patients. The ability to predict length of stay can substantially improve a teaching hospital's capacity utilization, while ensuring that resources are available to meet the health care needs of the Medicare population. Multiple regression models are developed to predict the length of stay using the patients' characteristics and clinical indicators as independent variables. The results indicate that approximately 60 percent (R(2)) of the variance in the length of stay is explained by the patients' characteristics and clinical indicators for these DRGs. The Mortality and Severity indices are found to be the strongest predictors for length of stay in all DRGs. Other patients' characteristics and clinical indicators such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, marital status, admission type and admission source are also significant predictors for some DRGs. In addition, most of these variables affect the length of stay in the same manner as shown in previous studies, even though the previous studies do not have the DRG specificity of this study.     

Use and cost of short-stay hospital inpatient services under Medicare, 1988

In this article, data are presented on trends in the use of and program payments for inpatient short-stay hospital services to Medicare beneficiaries. The data on the services used by aged and disabled Medicare beneficiaries are presented for the years 1972 through 1988. The discussion is focused on trends in utilization and program payments resulting from the implementation of the Medicare prospective payment system. The State data for 1988 consist of utilization and program payment statistics by the residence of the beneficiaries in urban and rural areas. This is the first time that inpatient hospital data have been presented in this manner.     

Medicare use and cost of short-stay hospital services by enrollees with cataract, 1984.

In this article, we present data on aged and disabled Medicare hospital insurance enrollees discharged with the principal diagnosis of cataract from short-stay hospitals. Medical technology has reduced the risk of cataract surgery and the time needed to perform the surgery. As a result, the number of enrollees undergoing cataract surgery has increased. Also, such surgery has been shifted from inpatient hospitals to outpatient facilities. However, outpatient reimbursement for cataract surgery often equals or exceeds inpatient payments. To address this inequity, Congress legislated payment limits for cataract surgery.     

Trends in length of stay for Medicare patients: 1979-87

Hospital length of stay (LOS) declined steadily during the 1970s, then rapidly during the early years of the Medicare prospective payment system (PPS). In this article, the authors examine trends in hospital LOS for Medicare patients from 1979 through 1987 for all cases combined, for medical and surgical cases separately, and for different geographic regions. The increase in LOS for surgical cases from 1985 through 1987 represented two offsetting trends. Continuing declines in LOS for most procedures were offset by an increased shift toward complex, long LOS procedures.     

Light and length of stay in hospital.

A study was carried out to examine whether the time spent as an inpatient in hospital showed a seasonal dependence which could be attributed to differences in ambient lighting levels between summer and winter. It was found that the season of admission to hospital did not make any appreciable difference to how long patients took to recover before they were discharged.     

Nursing dependency, diagnosis-related groups, and length of hospital stay.

Most efforts to modify the diagnosis-related group (DRG) case classification system focus on variables related to medical management. In this study, we investigated the separate but related natures of medicine and nursing by examining 1,288 adult medical and surgical patients in an urban teaching hospital. The complexity of medical treatment was measured by use of the DRG relative cost weight. The nursing indicator was derived from a set of nursing diagnoses. We found that the DRG cost weight is a poor predictor of nursing dependency and that the nursing dependence index added significantly to the DRG weight in explaining length of stay.     

Effect of pressure ulcers on length of hospital stay.

OBJECTIVE: To identify the independent effect of pressure ulcers on excess length of stay and control for all observable factors that may also contribute to excess length of stay. Hospitalized patients who develop a pressure ulcer during their hospital stay are at a greater risk for increased length of stay as compared with patients who do not. DESIGN: Cross-sectional, observational study. SETTNG: Tertiary-care referral and teaching hospital in Australia. PATIENTS: Two thousand hospitalized patients 18 years and older who had a minimum stay in the hospital of 1 night and admission to selected clinical units. METHODS: Two thousand participants were randomly selected from 4,500 patients enrolled in a prospective survey conducted between October 2002 and January 2003. Quantile median robust regression was used to assess risk factors for excess length of hospital stay. RESULTS: Having a pressure ulcer resulted in a median excess length of stay of 4.31 days. Twenty other variables were statistically significant at the 5% level in the final model. CONCLUSIONS: Pressure ulcers make a significant independent contribution to excess length of hospitalization beyond what might be expected based on admission diagnosis. However, our estimates were substantially lower than those currently used to make predictions of the economic costs of pressure ulcers; existing estimates may overstate the true economic cost.     

Factors influencing hospital high length of stay outliers

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: The study of length of stay (LOS) outliers is important for the management and financing of hospitals. Our aim was to study variables associated with high LOS outliers and their evolution over time. METHODS: We used hospital administrative data from inpatient episodes in public acute care hospitals in the Portuguese National Health Service (NHS), with discharges between years 2000 and 2009, together with some hospital characteristics. The dependent variable, LOS outliers, was calculated for each diagnosis related group (DRG) using a trim point defined for each year by the geometric mean plus two standard deviations. Hospitals were classified on the basis of administrative, economic and teaching characteristics. We also studied the influence of comorbidities and readmissions. Logistic regression models, including a multivariable logistic regression, were used in the analysis. All the logistic regressions were fitted using generalized estimating equations (GEE). RESULTS: In near nine million inpatient episodes analysed we found a proportion of 3.9 % high LOS outliers, accounting for 19.2 % of total inpatient days. The number of hospital patient discharges increased between years 2000 and 2005 and slightly decreased after that. The proportion of outliers ranged between the lowest value of 3.6 % (in years 2001 and 2002) and the highest value of 4.3 % in 2009. Teaching hospitals with over 1,000 beds have significantly more outliers than other hospitals, even after adjustment to readmissions and several patient characteristics. CONCLUSIONS: In the last years both average LOS and high LOS outliers are increasing in Portuguese NHS hospitals. As high LOS outliers represent an important proportion in the total inpatient days, this should be seen as an important alert for the management of hospitals and for national health policies. As expected, age, type of admission, and hospital type were significantly associated with high LOS outliers. The proportion of high outliers does not seem to be related to their financial coverage; they should be studied in order to highlight areas for further investigation. The increasing complexity of both hospitals and patients may be the single most important determinant of high LOS outliers and must therefore be taken into account by health managers when considering hospital costs.     

Trends in physician assignment rates for Medicare services, 1968-85.

This article provides an overview of trends in Medicare assignment rates. It covers changes over time in assignment by demographic characteristics and State and analyzes beneficiary liability. Although assignment rates were rising slowly from 1977 to 1983, beneficiary liability was also rising, primarily because of the rise in physician charges and the reduction on allowed charges. Substantial increases in the assignment rate have coincided with the implementation of provisions in the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 to encourage assignment, and the assignment rate reached on all time high of 69 percent in 1985.     

Effect of the structure of hospital payment on length of stay.

In response to rapidly rising costs, payers for health care services have made a number of changes in the way they reimburse hospitals for care. In this article we study the effect of different payment methods on the length of stay of Medicaid patients. We examine supply response by type of patient (medical, surgical, and psychiatric) and hospital ownership. We find that per case payment systems and negotiated contracts lead to significant decreases in the length of stay for all groups. Prospective per diem with limits in most cases leads to decreases in the length of stay. In general, we find that the supply response is stronger for psychiatric patients than for medical and surgical patients, and that publicly owned hospitals are more responsive to payment system incentives than are nonpublic hospitals.     

Effect of healthcare-acquired infection on length of hospital stay and cost.

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the independent effect of a single lower respiratory tract infection, urinary tract infection, or other healthcare-acquired infection on length-of-stay and variable costs and to demonstrate the bias from omitted variables that is present in previous estimates. DESIGN: Prospective cohort study.Setting. A tertiary care referral hospital and regional district hospital in southeast Queensland, Australia. PATIENTS: Adults aged 18 years or older with a minimum inpatient stay of 1 night who were admitted to selected clinical specialities. RESULTS: Urinary tract infection was not associated with an increase in length of hospital stay or variable costs. Lower respiratory tract infection was associated with an increase of 2.58 days in the hospital and variable costs of AU $24, whereas other types of infection were associated with an increased length of stay of 2.61 days but not with variable costs. Many other factors were found to be associated with increased length of stay and variable costs alongside healthcare-acquired infection. The exclusion of these variables caused a positive bias in the estimates of the costs of healthcare-acquired infection. CONCLUSIONS: The existing literature may overstate the costs of healthcare-acquired infection because of bias, and the existing estimates of excess costs may not make intuitive sense to clinicians and policy makers. Accurate estimates of the costs of healthcare-acquired infection should be made and used in appropriately designed decision-analytic economic models (ie, cost-effectiveness models) that will make valid and believable predictions of the economic value of increased infection control.     

Modelling hospital length of stay using convolutive mixtures distributions

Length of hospital stay (LOS) is an important indicator of the hospital activity and management of health care. The skewness in the distribution of LOS poses problems in statistical modelling because it fails to adequately follow the usual traditional distribution of positive variables such as the log‐normal distribution. We present in this paper a model using the convolution of two distributions, a technique well known in the signal processing community. The specificity of that model is that the variable of interest is considered to be the resulting sum of two random variables with different distributions. One of the variables features the patient‐related factors in terms of their need to recover from their admission condition, while the other models the hospital management process such as the discharging process. Two estimation procedures are proposed. One is the classical maximum likelihood, while the other relates to the expectation–maximization algorithm. We present some results obtained by applying this model to a set of real data from a group of hospitals in Victoria (Australia). Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Length of hospital stay of Medicare patients in the post-prospective-payment-system era

This study examines factors determining hospital length of stay (LOS) for Medicare patients in the post-prospective-payment-system (PPS) era according to type of ownership, geographical region, bed size, and financial performance. The study design includes a number of economic and financial variables. In the empirical findings, the following factors are significant in determining hospital LOS of Medicare patients: hospital size, type of ownership, profitability, teaching status, and competition. Other studies have examined factors influencing length of hospitalization; however, none of these studies investigates the effect on LOS of a change in the type of hospital ownership. Furthermore, this study uses more recent and comprehensive data than in the current literature.     

Fifty ways to reduce length of stay: an inventory of how hospital staff would reduce the length of stay in their hospital

PURPOSE AND SETTING: In this study we present a bottom up approach to developing interventions to shorten lengths of stay. Between 1999 and 2009 we applied the approach in 21 Dutch clinical wards in 12 hospitals. We present the complete inventory of all interventions. DESIGN: We organised, on the hospital ward level, structured meetings with the staff in order to first identify barriers to reduce the length of stay and then later to link them to interventions. The key components of the approach were a benchmark with the fifteenth percentile and the use of a matrix, that on one side was arranged along the main phases of the care process--the admission, stay and discharge--and on the other side to the degree to which the length of stay could be shortened by the medical specialists and nurses themselves or by involving others. FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS: The matrix consists of a wide variety of interventions that mainly cover what we found in published research. As a bottom up approach is more likely to succeed, we would advise wards that have to reduce length of stay to make the inventory themselves, using appropriate benchmark data, and by using the matrix.     

Relationship between hospital structural level and length of stay outliers. Implications for hospital payment systems

BACKGROUND: Hospital structural level has been suggested as a factor that could explain part of the resource use variation left unexplained by diagnosis related groups (DRGs). However, the relationship between hospital structural level and the presence of cases of extreme resource use (outliers) is not known. Some prospective payment systems pay these cases separately. OBJECTIVES: To analyze the relationship between different hospital structural levels, defined according to hospital size, teaching activity and location, and the presence of length of stay (LOS) outliers. RESEARCH DESIGN: A logit model was used to analyze the patient discharge records of the acute care public hospitals' Minimum Data Set in Catalonia (Spain) in 1998. The final population contained 631,096 discharges grouped in 329 adjacent DRGs. MEASURES: LOS outliers were defined as cases with a LOS exceeding the geometric mean plus two standard deviations of all the stays in the same DRG. The 64 public hospitals of the Catalan health system were classified into large urban teaching hospitals, medium-sized teaching and community hospitals, and small community hospitals according to their structural complexity. The model also controlled for patient and health care process characteristics. RESULTS: Outliers accounted for 4.5% of total discharges distributed as follows: large urban teaching hospitals (5.6%), medium-sized teaching and community hospitals (4.6%), small community hospitals (3.6%). The probability of a patient being an outlier was higher in hospitals with greater structural complexity: large urban teaching hospitals (OR = 1.59), medium teaching and community hospitals (OR = 1.30) and small community hospitals (OR = 1). Adjustment through the control variables reduced differences among hospitals: large urban teaching hospitals (OR = 1.32), medium-sized teaching and community hospitals (OR = 1.22), and small community hospitals (OR = 1), but the differences remained significant (P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Hospital structural level influences the presence of outliers even when controlling for patient and process characteristics. Thus, some outliers are due to hospital structural level and are not justified by patient characteristics.     

孕产妇住院时间影响因素分析

目的探讨西安市孕产妇住院时间的影响因素。 方法选择2015年12月至2016年12月,于西安交通大学第一附属医院产科住院分娩或治疗的3 421例孕产妇为研究对象。采用回顾性分析方法,采集孕产妇年龄、民族,以及本次妊娠住院时间、住院次数、医疗费用支付方式、分娩方式、就诊季节、手术级别、是否由其他科室转入产科病房、妊娠期并发症、围生儿妊娠结局等临床资料。2组孕产妇住院时间比较,采用成组t检验,3组比较,采用单因素方差分析。采用多重线性逐步回归分析法,对孕产妇住院时间影响因素进行多因素分析。本研究遵循的程序符合2013年修订的《世界医学协会赫尔辛基宣言》的要求。 结果①本研究3 421例孕产妇的住院时间为(6.4±3.0)d,生育年龄为(29.5±3.9)岁,高龄(≥35岁)产妇占11.0%(375/3 421)。②对孕产妇住院时间影响因素的单因素分析结果显示,不同年龄(<35岁与≥35岁),以及本次妊娠住院次数(1次与≥2次),医疗费用支付方式(全自费、新型农村合作医疗保险、城镇居民基本医疗保险、城镇职工基本医疗保险),分娩方式(自然分娩、产钳助产、剖宫产术分娩)及手术级别(治疗性操作或未进行手术,一、二、三级手术),是否由其他科室转入产科病房,是否有妊娠期并发症,围生儿妊娠结局为不良与良好孕产妇住院时间比较,差异均有统计学意义(t＝－3.34、－2.24,F＝15.46、268.81、259.68,t＝－7.58、－13.57、－13.82;P<0.05)。③对孕产妇住院时间影响因素进行多重线性逐步回归分析的结果显示,本次妊娠医疗费用支付费方式为全自费(β＝0.08,95%CI：0.01～0.16,P＝0.035)或新型农村合作医疗保险(β＝0.32,95%CI：0.06～0.59,P＝0.018),分娩方式为自然分娩(β＝0.29,95%CI：0.04～0.54,P＝0.026),手术级别为治疗性操作或未进行手术(β＝0.95,95%CI：0.71～1.19,P<0.001)或一级手术(β＝－0.47,95%CI：－0.79～－0.15,P＝0.004),住院次数≥2次(β＝0.26,95%CI：0.01～0.51,P＝0.043),有妊娠期并发症(β＝0.76,95%CI：0.58～0.95,P<0.001),围生儿妊娠结局不良(β＝0.80,95%CI：0.58～1.02,P<0.001),以及由其他科室转入产科病房(β＝6.55,95%CI：4.32～8.77,P<0.001),均为孕产妇住院时间的影响因素。 结论西安市孕产妇住院时间,可能受医疗费用支付方式、分娩方式、手术级别、妊娠期并发症、围生儿妊娠结局、由其他科室转入产科病房等多种因素的影响。临床应当采取针对性措施,缩短孕产妇住院时间,减轻医院负担,提高医疗资源的使用效率。