Title

The Association Between Clinical Pathways And Hospital Length Of Stay: A Case Study

Keywords

Clinical pathway; Inpatient hospital use; Inpatient length of stay; Rural hospital

Abstract

Clinical pathways are the treatment protocol in order to reduce or eliminate variation of care by specifying to nursing and medical staff. The effectiveness of the clinical pathways to accomplish this goal, however, is in question. With the implementation of the clinical pathways in 2001, this study evaluates the effectiveness of clinical pathway in reducing the inpatient length of stay in a rural hospital in a Midwestern state. All inpatient cases were used with the primary diagnoses of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure, diabetes, myocardial infarction, and pneumonia from the years of 1999-2003. By controlling for gender, age, insurance type, and year, this study employs a multiple regression analysis to evaluate the association between clinical pathways and the length of stay. Only one (the clinical pathway for myocardial infarction) out of the five pathways studied showed an association with a statistical significance in decreasing the length of stay. Health care administrators should consider other aspects as well as the hospital length of stays when implementing clinical pathways in their facility. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Publication Date

2-1-2007

Publication Title

Journal of Medical Systems

Volume

31

Issue

1

Number of Pages

79-83

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-006-9045-9

Socpus ID

33845917391 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/33845917391

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