Interaction of mental comorbidity and physical multimorbidity predicts length-of-stay in medical inpatients

Sophia Stahl-Toyota, Christoph Nikendei, Ede Nagy, Stefan Bönsel, Ivo Rollmann, Inga Unger, Julia Szendrödi, Norbert Frey, Patrick Michl, Carsten Müller-Tidow, Dirk Jäger, Hans-Christoph Friederich and Achim Hochlehnert

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 6, 1-16

Abstract: Background: Mental comorbidities of physically ill patients lead to higher morbidity, mortality, health-care utilization and costs. Objective: The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of mental comorbidity and physical multimorbidity on the length-of-stay in medical inpatients at a maximum-care university hospital. Design: The study follows a retrospective, quantitative cross-sectional analysis approach to investigate mental comorbidity and physical multimorbidity in internal medicine patients. Patients: The study comprised a total of n = 28.553 inpatients treated in 2017, 2018 and 2019 at a German Medical University Hospital. Main measures: Inpatients with a mental comorbidity showed a median length-of-stay of eight days that was two days longer compared to inpatients without a mental comorbidity. Neurotic and somatoform disorders (ICD-10 F4), behavioral syndromes (F5) and organic disorders (F0) were leading with respect to length-of-stay, followed by affective disorders (F3), schizophrenia and delusional disorders (F2), and substance use (F1), all above the sample mean length-of-stay. The impact of mental comorbidity on length-of-stay was greatest for middle-aged patients. Mental comorbidity and Elixhauser score as a measure for physical multimorbidity showed a significant interaction effect indicating that the impact of mental comorbidity on length-of-stay was greater in patients with higher Elixhauser scores. Conclusions: The findings provide new insights in medical inpatients how mental comorbidity and physical multimorbidity interact with respect to length-of-stay. Mental comorbidity had a large effect on length-of-stay, especially in patients with high levels of physical multimorbidity. Thus, there is an urgent need for new service models to especially care for multimorbid inpatients with mental comorbidity.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287234 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 87234&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0287234

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287234

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().