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Even in their senior years, baby boomers will pose an enormous challenge to hospitals, which must find new ways to provide comprehensive, quality geriatric care. A number of hospitals have established ACE units, which take a wholistic, team approach to treating older patients, and appear to improve outcomes, satisfaction and maybe the bottom line.
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Clinical observation units are emerging as a solution to such pressing problems as crowded emergency departments and a lack of inpatient beds. One proponent says the units "allow clinicians to provide care better, cheaper and faster".
BACKGROUND: --To determine the importance of the emergency department as the means of access to the hospital for the poor and the fiscal implications of providing these services, we examined the relationship between patients' socioeconomic status and admission via the emergency department. We also determined the association between entering the hospital via the emergency department and hospital resource use. METHODS: --We conducted a study of 20,089 patients admitted to five Massachusetts hospitals (three community, two tertiary care) during a 6-month period. We determined the proportions of patients within various socioeconomic and disease groupings who entered through the emergency department. We compared length of stay and charges for patients admitted through the emergency department with those for patients admitted through other routes. RESULTS: --Overall, 51% of patients entered via the emergency department. Elderly patients (age greater than 65 years; odds ratio, 1.87) and patients with lower socioeconomic status as measured by income, occupation, and education (odds ratios, 2.38, 1.47, and 1.69, respectively) were more likely to enter the hospital via the emergency department than other patients. After adjustment for diagnosis related group, severity as measured by DRGSCALE, and socioeconomic status as measured by income, and excluding outliers, patients admitted via the emergency department stayed 27% longer and incurred 13% higher charges than other patients (P less than .001). CONCLUSIONS: --Our data indicate that patients with lower socioeconomic status are more likely than other patients to use the emergency department as their means of access to the hospital and that patients admitted via the emergency department use far more resources than patients in the same diagnosis related group admitted by other means. Hospitals that make emergency department services more available may be more likely to hospitalize socioeconomically disadvantaged patients and may be at a substantial financial disadvantage under per-case reimbursement systems such as Medicare.
This study uses a new database containing clinical risk factors for cardiac surgery to investigate the relationship between surgical volume (hospital and surgeon) and inhospital mortality rate for all patients receiving coronary artery bypass surgery in New York State in 1989. Also, hospitals with significantly higher and lower mortality rates than expected on the basis of patient preoperative risk factors are identified. The results demonstrate that both annual surgeon volume and annual hospital volume are significantly (inversely) related to mortality rate. The 36% of all coronary bypass operations performed in hospitals with annual bypass volumes of 700 or more by surgeons with annual bypass volumes of 180 or more had a risk-adjusted mortality rate of 2.67% in comparison to a risk-adjusted mortality rate of 4.29% for other bypass operations. Furthermore, low surgical volumes were a major contributor to the outlier status of four of the five hospitals with significantly higher mortality rates than expected.
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In a Harvard Business Review (1987) article, Herzlinger and Krasker suggested that not-for-profit hospitals do not return more benefit to society than do for-profit hospitals, and the authors questioned the legitimacy of social subsidization of not-for-profits. Our article reports findings from an empirical reconsideration of the question, "Who profits from nonprofits?" We used hospital data from the same time period (1982) as that used by Herzlinger and Krasker; however, our investigation analyzed a larger data set (including both system and nonsystem hospitals) and used a different statistical technique (discriminant analysis). Our findings suggest that not-for-profits return more social benefit (e.g., in the areas of services provided, access to care, and involvement in professional education) than do for-profits. Like Herzlinger and Krasker, we find that for-profit hospitals may be more efficient than not-for-profits. We caution that public policy regarding social subsidization of not-for-profit hospitals should be made only after more intensive study and thoughtful consideration.
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In contrast to assertions that investor-owned (I-O) hospitals are more efficient than voluntary hospitals, this study finds no significant difference between I-Os and voluntaries where the efficiency measure is length of hospitalization (LOH). The data base used is a national probability sample of hospitals and patients. The analysis accounts for variation in LOH by controlling for hospital characteristics other than ownership, and in particular it utilizes a new case-mix index to control for the case-mix portion of heretofore suggested differences.
To clarify the financial incentives for hospitals to prevent nosocomial infections, we analyzed 9423 nosocomial infections identified in 169 526 admissions selected randomly from the adult admissions to a random sample of US hospitals. By classifying each admission into a baseline diagnosis related group (DRG) (after first excluding all diagnoses of nosocomial infection) and a final DRG (after including these diagnoses), we found that only 5% to 18% of nosocomial infections would have caused the admission to be reclassified to a higher-paying DRG, depending on the extent to which physicians recorded nosocomial infection diagnoses in patients' medical records. The extra payment from the reclassification, averaged over all nosocomial infections, would have been no more than $93 per infection (in 1985 reimbursement rates), constituting only 5% of the hospitals' costs for treating these infections. Thus, at least 95% of the cost savings obtained from preventing nosocomial infections represents financial gains to the hospital.
The National Association of Public Hospitals and the Association of American Medical Colleges' Council of Teaching Hospitals conducted a detailed survey on hospital care to patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in major US public and private teaching institutions in 1985. The 169 hospitals treating patients with AIDS that responded to the survey reported providing inpatient services to 5393 patients with AIDS. These patients accounted for 171,205 inpatient days and 8806 inpatient admissions, with an average length of stay of 19 days. The average costs and revenue for patients with AIDS per day were $635 and $482, respectively, with Medicaid representing the most frequent third-party payer. The average inpatient cost per patient per year was $20,320. Using Centers for Disease Control estimates of 18,720 patients diagnosed as having AIDS and alive during any part of 1985, we estimate that the total cost of inpatient care for patients with AIDS was $380 million for that year. We also found significant regional and ownership differences in source of payment for patients with AIDS and regional differences in revenues received for AIDS treatment. Results indicate that the costs of treating patients with AIDS will profoundly affect major public and private teaching institutions, but that public teaching hospitals in states with restrictive Medicaid programs will be most adversely affected.
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Profound changes are occurring in the health care system, including a surfeit of physicians, cost containment, and competition. This article addresses the effects of these changes on the academic medical center. It recommends that the faculty of the future will be of two types--clinician-teachers and researcher-teachers--and outlines the qualifications of these faculties. It recommends a proper reward system for clinician-teachers, the reintroduction of part-time faculties, and careful retrenchment in medical school class size and house staff. It calls for teaching hospitals to improve their physical plants and control costs by phasing out programs that are not cost-effective. Universities should consider divesting themselves of university-owned teaching hospitals. Most importantly, local, state, and federal governments and the public must develop a more supportive attitude toward the needs of medical education.