OBJECTIVE Estimating the cost of chicken pox in a Colombian pediatric population. METHODOLOGY This was a retrospective case study which searched for all diagnosed chicken pox cases in the Napoleón Franco Pareja children's hospital (Cartagena, Colombia), during 2005-2008. The hospital's records/perspective was used. Cost related to health personnel, lab, diagnostic images and drugs were search...

PURPOSE To evaluate the effect of preoperative comorbidity status (defined by the Deyo index) on hospital mortality, postoperative complications, length of hospital stay, and hospital costs for shoulder arthroplasty patients. METHODS The overall mean hospital mortality and postoperative complication rates, and length of hospital stay and hospital costs stratified by the Deyo score were compar...

The Republic of Ireland's Medico-Social Research Board spent over half of its £800,000 budget on setting up a hospital inpatient enquiry scheme because of a need "to study the cost effectiveness of health care". It emerged that in Ireland the number of hospital beds used daily per hundred thousand population was ten per cent higher than in Scotland mainly because Irish patients stayed in hospit...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Dehydration is a common complication after ileostomy creation and is the most frequent reason for postoperative readmission to the hospital. We sought to determine the clinical and economic impact of an outpatient intervention to decrease readmissions for dehydration after ileostomy creation. METHODS All new ileostomates from 09/2011 through 10/2012 at the University...

This article estimates the burden of hospitalization associated with overweight and obesity in Brazil. The analysis of all hospitalizations for men and women from 20 to 60 years of age was based on the National Healthcare Expenditure Database (SIH-SUS), covering more than 70% of all hospital admissions. Data were for the year 2001. Attributable fraction of hospitalizations associated with disea...

labored under the historic burden of its essential mission being that of carrying out the work of God, a mission for which material reward was deemed unimportant. A second, and lower, minimum wage existed for employed hospital workers, and many institutions were peopled by nuns and others paid far less than the prevailing wage elsewhere. Juxtaposed with this otherworldly view, the hospital was ...

BACKGROUND Accurate hospital costs are required for policy-makers, hospital managers and clinicians to improve efficiency and transparency. However, different methods are used to allocate direct costs, and their agreement is poorly understood. The aim of this study was to assess the agreement between bottom-up and top-down unit costs of a large sample of surgical operations in a French tertiary...

An arterial pseudoaneurysm is an uncommon complication of cardiovascular procedures associated with considerable morbidity and increased hospital costs. Percutaneous thrombin injection is one approach to therapy. We describe our initial experience with this technique in 3 patients, with special attention to the utility of sonographic guidance. In all cases complete closure was achieved, althoug...

Kidney donor exchanges enable recipients with immunologically incompatible donors to receive compatible living donor grafts; however, the financial management of these exchanges, especially when an organ is shipped, is complex and thus has the potential to impede the broader implementation of donor exchange programs. Representatives from transplant centers that utilize the National Kidney Regis...

In an attempt to control rapid growth in hospital costs, beginning in the mid-1970s several states implemented rate-setting programs to regulate hospital payments. In seven states, rate-setting was in effect for a substantial period of time (14 years or more). While most of these programs were discontinued by the mid-1990s, two are still active. In five of the seven states, the rates of increas...