Does ICU admission compared to non-ICU admission affect hospital charges and long-term survival in patients from a community hospital?
Long-term survival for ICU patients discharged alive from a community hospital is similar to that of non-ICU patients, suggesting the long-term outlook after intensive care is better than generally assumed.
Hospital charges and long-term (2 yr) survival were evaluated for 558 ICU and 124 non-ICU patients from a large community hospital. Although the ICU patients represented only 9.5% of total hospital admissions, they incurred nearly 30% of the total hospital charges and had a median hospital charge of greater than four times the non-ICU comparison group. For the ICU patients, the overall in-hospital mortality rate was 17.3% and the overall 2-yr mortality rate was 35.6%, whereas the non-ICU group rates were 3.4 and 14.8% respectively. Given a patient was discharged alive from the hospital, the proportion surviving an additional 2 yr was strikingly similar for the two groups (83.3% of ICU patients and 89.1% of non-ICU patients). Because of excess mortality for ICU patients, discharged from a community hospital was not significantly greater than for non-ICU patients, the long-term outlook for discharged patients after receiving intensive care is not as bleak as is generally assumed.
Parno et al. (1982) studied this question.
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