title: Pounds of cure: chart weight as a measure of service intensity.
abstract: Intensity of hospital services is often estimated by length of stay (LOS). Increasing demands for documentation in the medical record suggested to us an alternate method: weighing the chart. In a retrospective study, we compared LOS and chart weight as predictors of actual hospital costs at a community teaching hospital. We reviewed a sample of 123 patients randomly chosen from the medical service and stratified by phase of the academic year. Both least-squares regression and a multiple sampling/validating technique were used to derive mean cost per ounce of chart and per day of stay. Costs estimated from weight were within 7% and from LOS within 14% of measured actual costs among patients not used to derive the formulae. We conclude that the intensity of paper documentation closely reflects actual costs; the same may be true of bytes or key-strokes for electronic records.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine Monmouth Medical Center, Long Branch, NJ, USA. daniel.shine@med.nyu.edu
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Shine
authors.forename: Alvin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Fried
authors.forename: Pratibha
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.forename: Anca
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Andrei
mesh_terms: D004282:Documentation; D017721:Hospital Costs; D006764:Hospitals, Community; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching; D006801:Humans; D007902:Length of Stay / Q000191:economics*; D008499:Medical Records; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D014481:United States; D014894:Weights and Measures