Clostridium difficile infection as a novel marker for hospital quality, efficiency and other factors associated with prolonged inpatient length of stay

摘要: Excess inpatient length of stay (LOS) varies between hospitals and is burdensome to patients the overall healthcare system. Variation in LOS has often been associated with hospital-level factors, such as hospital e ciency quality. Clostridium di cile infection (CDI) an increasingly common hospital-acquired (HA) infection. This thesis explores connection incidence CDI excess without a CDI. It hypothesized that HA-CDI may act “proxy variable” capture unobserved characteristics, quality or ciency, prolonged LOS. In addition, longer tend observe more cases prior discharge. analyzes ability variation across hospitals, while controlling for occur after We use data on visits, spanning years 2005-2011, from three sources distributed by Healthcare Cost Utilization Project: Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), State Databases (SID) California New York. The NIS provides discharge records nationwide sampling given year. SIDs are longitudinal populations each state, patient can be linked stays. compute variety di↵erent measures identify HACDI discharged. Various multivariable regression models analyzed predict at