Costly private hospital rooms save systems as quality links with cost, Cornell study says
The high cost is more than offset by the financial benefits of keeping patients safe from hospital-acquired infections.
Because hospital-acquired infections are a common complication and extend inpatient stays, hospitals actually save money by building costly, single-patient rooms, according to a new study by Cornell University.
The high cost of building added single-patient rooms is more than offset by the financial benefits of keeping patients safe from hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA, the study suggests.
Hospital-acquired infections are the most common complication of hospital care, increasing cost and risk of mortality.
Recent healthcare reforms link Medicare reimbursements of hospital care to the performance of hospitals, including infection rates. As a result, hospitals have stepped up efforts to cut incidents of acquired infectious diseases in medical facilities.
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"We showed that although single-patient rooms are more costly to build and operate, they can result in substantial savings compared with open-bay rooms--all of this by avoiding costs associated with hospital-acquired infections," said Hessam Sadatsafavi, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University.
For the new study, published in the Journal of Critical Care, researchers compared costs of constructing single rooms or converting multi-patient rooms to private rooms, including subsequent annual operational costs, and then looked at the "internal rate of return" to assess the financial feasibility of the investment in private rooms.
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For investors, the internal rate of return must be acceptable --10 percent, for example -- to consider a capital project possible. The researchers discovered that building new private rooms or private-room conversions made economic sense, as the internal rate of return -- over a five-year analysis period -- was 56.18 percent, according to the study.
"You have to spend additional money to treat the patients that acquired infection, as it would increase their hospital stay, and to contain the sickness--powerful cleaning supplies, support services," Sadatsafavi said. "Single-patient ICU rooms reduce the cross-transmission rate and avoid extra medical costs to contain infection, and our research showed that these savings offsets capital costs."
Twitter: @SusanJMorse
