Trends in Mortality and Medical Spending in Patients Hospitalized for Community-Acquired Pneumonia: 1993–2005

Gregory W. Ruhnke, Marcelo Coca-Perraillon, Barrett Tyler Kitch and David M. Cutler

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: Background: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is the most common infectious cause of death in the United States. To understand the impact of efforts to improve quality and efficiency of care in CAP, we examined trends in mortality and costs among hospitalized CAP patients. Methods: Using the National Inpatient Sample from 1993–2005, we studied 569,524 CAP admissions. The primary outcome was mortality at discharge. We used logistic regression to evaluate the mortality trend, adjusting for age, gender, and comorbidities. To account for the impact of early discharge practices, we also compared daily mortality rates and performed a Cox proportional-hazards model. We used a generalized linear model to analyze trends in hospitalization costs, which were derived using cost-to-charge ratios. Results: Over time, length of stay (LOS) declined, while more patients were discharged to other facilities. The frequency of many comorbidities increased. Age/gender-adjusted mortality decreased from 8.9% to 4.1% (P

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Medical Care

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/5344530/Trends%20in%20mortality.pdf (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:hrv:faseco:5344530

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().