Differences in Length of Stay and Costs Between Comparable Hospitalizations of Patients With Spina Bifida With or Without Pressure Injuries.
Yinding Wang, Lijing Ouyang, Brad E Dicianno and 4 others
PMID 30684491WHAT IT FOUND
In comparable spina bifida hospitalizations, pressure injuries were associated with 1.2 extra days in hospital and $1,182 higher costs.
The study cannot tell whether the injuries caused the longer stays or costs.
Key findings
01In comparable spina bifida hospitalizations, pressure injuries were associated with an average extra 1.2 days in hospital and $1,182 in costs.
02Among 21,605 hospitalizations coded for spina bifida, 3,888 had pressure injuries and 17,717 did not.
03Hospitalizations with pressure injuries were most common at ages 21 to 30 years, while hospitalizations without pressure injuries were more common at ages 1 through 20 years.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used hospital billing records, so spina bifida and pressure injuries were identified by diagnosis codes, and some cases may have been missed. The pressure injury code included all stages, so the study could not tell whether the stage of the injury affected length of stay or costs. The data did not show whether pressure injuries were present when patients arrived or developed during the hospital stay, so the study cannot show that pressure injuries caused longer stays or higher costs. The records were based on hospital encounters, not individual people, so multiple admissions for the same patient could not be distinguished. Deaths and end-of-life hospitalizations were excluded, including 214 deaths among hospitalizations coded for spina bifida, so the results do not describe those hospitalizations. Hospitalizations coded for other congenital spinal cord anomalies were not included, so the results apply only to hospitalizations coded for spina bifida.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that preventing pressure injuries will shorten hospital stays or reduce costs. The study compared hospitalizations that already had pressure injuries with similar hospitalizations that did not, and it could not separate injuries present on admission from injuries that developed during the stay.