Cost Savings Attributable to Reductions in Intensive Care Unit Length of Stay for Mechanically Ventilated Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To estimate the actual cost savings that could be achieved through reductions in intensive care unit (ICU) length of stay and duration of mechanical ventilation by determining the short-run marginal variable cost of an ICU and ventilator day. RESEARCH DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study in a university-affiliated teaching hospital. SUBJECTS: All patients receiving mechanical ventilation in the ICU for more than 48 hours (n = 1778) from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006. MEASURES: The hospital's administrative and cost databases were used to determine total costs, variable costs, and direct-variable costs for each patient on each individual ICU and hospital day. RESULTS: Direct-variable costs comprised 19.3% of total ICU costs and 18.4% of total hospital costs. Marginal direct-variable costs (the cost of each additional ICU day) were small compared with the average daily total cost ($649 to $839 vs. $1751, in US dollars). In survivors with ICU lengths of stay more than 3 days, the mean direct-variable cost of the last ICU day was $397, while the mean direct-variable cost of the first ward day was $279, for a mean cost difference of $118 (95% CI, $21-$190). Reducing ICU and hospital length of stay by 1 day in all survivors with ICU lengths of stay more than 3 days would result in an immediate cost savings of only 0.2% of all hospital expenditures for these patients. CONCLUSIONS: Marginal variable ICU costs are relatively small compared with average total costs and are only slightly greater than the cost of a ward day.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".