Are inpatient short stays worth pursuing?

Hospital financial leaders are pressured to find efficiencies.

Some may look for ways to simplify their utilization review function to reduce costs. A common mistake hospitals make is to use a time-based standard for patient status that assigns all short stays as outpatient to reduce review time and complexity.

Such a policy can have dire consequences for financial integrity, as well as several other vital areas of a hospital’s operations, like patient satisfaction and quality monitoring. 

In this paper, we discuss these ramifications to expose the true cost of oversimplifying utilization review. We consider the consequences such a policy would have on four aspects of a health system.

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