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Hospital Reimbursement Patterns Among Patients With Surgical Wound Infections Following Open Heart Surgery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2016

John M. Boyce ,
Gail Potter-Bynoe  and
Linda Dziobek
John M. Boyce*
Affiliation:
Division of Infectious Diseases and Infection Control Program, Miriam Hospital and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
Gail Potter-Bynoe
Affiliation:
Division of Infectious Diseases and Infection Control Program, Miriam Hospital and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
Linda Dziobek
Affiliation:
Division of Infectious Diseases and Infection Control Program, Miriam Hospital and Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
*
Div. of Infectious Diseases, The Miriam Hospital, 164 Summit Ave., Providence, RI 02906
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Abstract

Of the more than 200,000 patients who undergo open heart surgery annually in the United States, 2% to 10% will develop a post-operative infectionrelated to their surgery. The economic impact of such infections on hospitals under the prospective payment system is unclear. To study the effect of such infections on hospital costs and reimbursement patterns, we compared case patients with controls of similar age, sex, urgency of surgery and type of surgery. The postoperative stay for cases was significantly longer than for matched controls (26.8 days and 8.3 days, respectively; p = .0002). The mean hospital cost for case admissions ($25,957) was twice as high as for control admissions ($12,795) (p = .0002). Cases resulted in an average net loss to the hospital of $2,344 per patient, while controls yielded an average net gain of $3,196 per patient (p = .02). We conclude that hospitals have substantial financial incentives tominimize the incidence of postoperative wound infections associated with open heart surgery.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , February 1990 , pp. 89 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America 1990

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