COMPARATIVE STUDY OF INPATIENT HOSPITALIZATION LENGTHS OF STAY AND DISCHARGE DISPOSITIONS ACROSS HEALTHCARE PAYER TYPES.

Considering the progressive growth of healthcare expenses in the national economy, many of those impacts are directly seen in the cost to our publicly and privately funded healthcare insurance programs. This research will utilize a version of the Behavioral Healthcare Utilization Model (BHUM) to conduct a comparative analysis of medical insurance payers and discharge dispositions. It will look at all payer types of healthcare funding in comparison to discharge disposition outcomes concerning acute care hospital admissions for patients that are age 45 to 75 and when diagnosed with Medical Severity Diagnosis Related Code 207, Respiratory Failure with Mechanical Ventilation Greater Than Ninety-Six Hours. This study will evaluate the lengths of stay, payer type, total charges of an acute care hospitalization as well as the discharge dispositions of those cases with the moderating effects of age, gender, and race on those relationships. The analysis will utilize the MS-DRG 207 as a control variable so that discharge disposition is moderated by the predisposing patient characteristics utilized by health systems and insurance payers to monitor per patient profit or loss variances. This research hopes to provide perspective on both the financial and quality of care aspects of a healthcare payer's influence on the healthcare system and how this impact may outweigh sociocultural and sociodemographic variables. Research objectives will benefit health system executives, healthcare insurance payer systems, and legislative planning committees. It will show how those differences in care management could affect long-term healthcare costs associated with care through hospital lengths of stay and payer influences on this utilization services.