Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

The length of stay and the hospital cost for ICU patients with resistant bacterial infections: a pilot study

Background

Healthcare in India comes mostly as an out of the pocket payment as health insurance is virtually absent for majority of the population. Determination of the typical hospital cost and length of stay (LOS) are of decisive importance for patients, healthcare providers, and payers who need to make evidence based rational decisions about patient care and the allocation of resources.

Methods

A cross sectional pilot study was performed and the data for LOS and hospital cost was collected from the medicine ICU and the accounts section for 38 patients with resistant bacterial infections who were admitted to Intensive care unit. The data was analyzed for average LOS and hospital cost for infections. The data was analyzed using univariate analysis.

Results

Almost 29% of the patients with resistant infections were between 18-40 years of age. The mean cost of hospitalization was found to be INR76082.79 and only 34% of the patients were having any insurance coverage. The median length of stay in the hospital ICU was 8.5 days. 37% of the patients were on ventilator during the hospitalization and 25% of the total patients died.

Conclusion

Resistant bacterial infections may lead to a high LOS in the ICU furthermore adding to the economic burden of the patient, healthcare provider and the payer. These results can be used to study the treatment alternatives in case of resistant infections and making them cost effective at the same time stressing upon the need of health insurance among the population.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nagappa Anantha Naik.

Rights and permissions

Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Priyendu, A., Naik, N.A., Varma, M. et al. The length of stay and the hospital cost for ICU patients with resistant bacterial infections: a pilot study. BMC Infect Dis 14 (Suppl 3), P38 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S3-P38

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S3-P38

Keywords