Population-based Morbidity and Mortality Measures
The statistics provided by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2011) allow to see and compare the key indicators for hospital care and to see the average patient characteristics, such as the age and the length of stay, as well as the financial metrics, such as the national bill and the mean inpatient charges. These statistics could be utilized in hospital decision making, as they allow to compare the specific organization to the country as a whole and to see the areas for potential focus. In the present paper, the key country-wide statistics for the year 2003 are analyzed.
The total number of inpatient discharges in 2003 was 37,074,605. As defined by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2011), a discharge is a hospital stay – thus, the number is only roughly representative of the total number of people who were admitted for inpatient care, as the same person may have been admitted twice within the same year, but it provides a measure of the volume of patients.
The specific characteristics of the hospital stays can then be analyzed further. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the mean length of hospital stay in 2003 was 4.6 days, which means that on average, a patient spent in the hospital less than one week.
The mean age of the people admitted to inpatient care in 2003 was 48. The total number of discharges was the highest for the age group 65-84, they accounted for 27.38% of all discharges. Another group that accounted for more than a quarter of all the discharges was the 18-44 year olds (26.36% of all discharges). 2.2% of the hospital inpatients died in 2003, which is a measure of in-hospital mortality.
Apart from the characteristics of the patients, the nation-wide financial statistics for inpatient discharges can be explored. The national bill that provides an aggregate measure of all the charges for all the hospital stays in the U.S. amounted to 729,135,003,607 dollars in 2003. This number divided by the number of inpatient discharges allows to calculate the mean charges, which in 2003 was 19,677 dollars. The mean charges could be used to understand the average amount that patients are charged when provided healthcare services. This could provide a valuable base for decision making (Osborn, 2008). For instance, comparing the mean charges in a specific hospital with the national charges could allow to benchmark the hospital’s policy compared to the average. Furthermore, relating the mean charge with the mean cost, that was 7,274 in 2003 for the country as a whole, could provide an idea of the financial situation in the organization compared to the industry in general.
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2011). HCUPnet: Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Retrieved February 23, 2017, from https://hcupnet.ahrq.gov/
Osborn, C. E. (2008). Essentials of statistics in health information technology. Sudbury, Mass: Jones and …
