ArticleBMC health services research2018
Evaluation of hospital outcomes: the relation between length-of-stay, readmission, and mortality in a large international administrative database.
Article in BMC health services research, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 95 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
95 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pancreatic surgery and length of hospital stay: meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials.BJS open · 2026Pooled it
- Methods to derive composite indicators used for quality and safety measurement and monitoring in healthcare: a scoping review.Frontiers in health services · 2026Pooled it
- The Impact of Sham Feeding with Chewing Gum on Postoperative Ileus Following Colorectal Surgery: a Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials.Journal of gastrointestinal surgery : official journal of the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract · 2020Pooled it
- A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Physical Exercise Prehabilitation in Major Abdominal Surgery (PROSPERO 2017 CRD42017080366).Journal of gastrointestinal surgery : official journal of the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract · 2020Pooled it
- Effect of a Co-Located Bridging Recovery Initiative on Hospital Length of Stay Among Patients With Opioid Use Disorder: The BRIDGE Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2024Trial
- Clostridioides difficile Near-Patient Testing Versus Centralized Testing: A Pragmatic Cluster Randomized Crossover Trial.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2023Trial
- Comparing Methods for Attributing Hospital Quality Metrics to Individual Physicians: Impact on Performance Assessment and Outlier Identification.Journal of general internal medicine · 2026Article
- Article
- Outcomes Associated With Hospital at Home vs Traditional Inpatient Stay.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Impact of Ascites on Morbidity and Length of Hospital Stay: A Large Retrospective Study from a Tertiary Referral Center.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2026Article
- Critically Ill Patients Presenting to the Emergency Department; Outcome Review in a Tertiary Care Center.Saudi medical journal · 2026Article
- Supporting Family Caregiver Health in Heart Failure: Longitudinal Associations Between Heart Failure Caregiver Self-Care and Patient Hospitalizations.Journal of cardiac failure · 2026Article
- Value-Based Outsourcing Is Associated with Improved Healthcare Outcomes in Low- and Intermediate-Complexity European Hospitals: A Cross-Sectional Study from Spain.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The trade-off between cost containment and quality enhancement under the DRG payment model.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- How Does Physician Clinical Experience Affect Quality of Care, as Measured by Length of Stay?Journal of Brown hospital medicine · 2026Review
- Article
- Mortality Trends and Characteristics in a Tertiary Hospital in Southwest Saudi Arabia: A 5-Year Retrospective Study.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2025Article
- Lower ambulatory care availability and greater hospital capacity are associated with higher hospital case volumes.Research in health services & regions · 2025Article
- Strategies to Reduce Hospital Length of Stay: Evidence and Challenges.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2025Review
- Sex-specific differences in alive hospital discharge following infrarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm repair.European heart journal · 2025Article
35 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundHospital mortality, readmission and length of stay (LOS) are commonly used measures for quality of care. We aimed to disentangle the correlations between these interrelated measures and propose a new way of combining them to evaluate the quality of hospital care.
methodsWe analyzed administrative data from the Global Comparators Project from 26 hospitals on patients discharged between 2007 and 2012. We correlated standardized and risk-adjusted hospital outcomes on mortality, readmission and long LOS. We constructed a composite measure with 5 levels, based on literature review and expert advice, from survival without readmission and normal LOS (best) to mortality (worst outcome). This composite measure was analyzed using ordinal regression, to obtain a standardized outcome measure to compare hospitals.
resultsOverall, we observed a 3.1% mortality rate, 7.8% readmission rate (in survivors) and 20.8% long LOS rate among 4,327,105 admissions. Mortality and LOS were correlated at the patient and the hospital level. A patient in the upper quartile LOS had higher odds of mortality (odds ratio = 1.45, 95% confidence interval 1.43-1.47) than those in the lowest quartile. Hospitals with a high standardized mortality had higher proportions of long LOS (r = 0.79, p < 0.01). Readmission rates did not correlate with either mortality or long LOS rates. The interquartile range of the standardized ordinal composite outcome was 74-117. The composite outcome had similar or better reliability in ranking hospitals than individual outcomes.
conclusionsCorrelations between different outcome measures are complex and differ between hospital- and patient-level. The proposed composite measure combines three outcomes in an ordinal fashion for a more comprehensive and reliable view of hospital performance than its component indicators.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.