Finding a place that would take the patient caused the most discharge delay days
Inpatient delay days by cause at 50 New York hospitals, April to June 2022. A patient can count under more than one cause.
Show the numbers as a table
| Category | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Placement setting | 35,625 days | Most often the facility was unable to accept the patient |
| Insurance or financial coverage | 18,490 days | |
| Guardianship | 11,650 days | |
| Other | 7,230 days | Mostly care preferences, housing and transportation |
| Agency eligibility or referral process | 6,975 days | |
| Advance care planning | 1,990 days |
About the data
- Source
- HANYS, The scope of complex case discharge delays in New York state (2023) (opens in a new tab)What is causing the delays?, p. 18, chart "Total inpatient delay days by external factor"
- Method
- HANYS counted patients who stayed more than 14 days on an inpatient unit after they were ready for discharge. Hospitals could name more than one cause per patient, so the bars add up to more than the 58,710 inpatient delay days in the pilot.
- Published
- Updated
Free to share and embed with credit to Kent Applied (CC BY 4.0). The source data keeps its own terms.
Facts from this chart
35,625
inpatient delay days where finding the patient's next place of care was a cause
In HANYS's 2022 pilot, finding a placement setting, somewhere for the patient to go after the hospital, was a cause in 35,625 inpatient discharge delay days, more than any other cause.
Source: The scope of complex case discharge delays in New York state.
KentApplied$169M
estimated cost of discharge delays at 52 hospitals in one quarter
HANYS found that 52 New York hospitals reported about 60,000 discharge delay days and $169 million in estimated costs from April to June 2022.
Source: The scope of complex case discharge delays in New York state.
KentApplied$2,800
estimated cost per inpatient delay day
Kent Applied divided the $167 million in estimated inpatient costs by the 58,710 inpatient delay days in the Healthcare Association of New York State's 2022 pilot survey, which puts one inpatient discharge delay day at about $2,800.
Source: The scope of complex case discharge delays in New York state.
KentApplied
Sources for the figures above: HANYS, The scope of complex case discharge delays in New York state (2023) (opens in a new tab).
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Sources for the figures above: American Hospital Association, Increasing Delays in Timely Discharges issue brief (December 2022) (opens in a new tab); Canellas MM et al., Measurement of Cost of Boarding in the Emergency Department Using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing, Annals of Emergency Medicine 84(4) (opens in a new tab); The Johns Hopkins Hospital Launches Capacity Command Center to Enhance Hospital Operations (news release) (opens in a new tab); Eugene Litvak, Bridging the Gap: Operations Management Science, Patient Safety and Health Care Cost (presentation) (opens in a new tab); Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Achieving Hospital-wide Patient Flow, 2nd edition (2020) (opens in a new tab).
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