The Impact Factors on the Hospital High Length of Stay Outliers

Abstract

Abstract The growing financial problems of healthcare institutions contribute to the search for methods of properly distributing and clearly justifying resources. One of these is detecting the length of stay outliers (LOS) accounting for an important share of hospital costs. The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors facilitating identification of hospital LOS outliers. A total of 4570 patients were analyzed. To select the outliers, I used the inter-quartile method, using the median and the inter-quartile distance. The LOS outliers comprised 5,4% of the study sample and accounted for almost 15% of total hospital costs and 25% of total inpatient days. The median and range of the total costs for LOS outliers were (€) 3145,26 (1930,54-4670,88). The status of an LOS outlier was associated with age and type of admission. Eighty three percent of the LOS were admitted to the hospital in an acute way. Most of the LOS outliers (56% of all LOS outliers) were younger than the mean for the study population. There was no significant correlation between the reason for discharge, the type of department or the gender and being an LOS outlier. It is concluded that identifying the LOS outliers can contribute to better knowledge of hospital costs and help the management of these institutions control those costs.