Reidar Hagtvedt

Costs attributable to healthcare-acquired infection in hospitalized adults and a comparison of economic methods.

Background:Hospitals will increasingly bear the costs for healthcare-acquired conditions such as infection. Our goals were to estimate the costs attributable to healthcare-acquired infection (HAI) and conduct a sensitivity analysis comparing analytic methods. Methods:A random sample of high-risk adults hospitalized in the year 2000 was selected. Measurements included total and variable medical costs, length of stay (LOS), HAI site, APACHE III score, antimicrobial resistance, and mortality. Medical costs were measured from the hospital perspective. Analytic methods included ordinary least squares linear regression and median quantile regression, Winsorizing, propensity score case matching, attributable LOS multiplied by mean daily cost, semi-log transformation, and generalized linear modeling. Three-state proportional hazards modeling was also used for LOS estimation. Attributable mortality was estimated using logistic regression. Results:Among 1253 patients, 159 (12.7%) developed HAI. Using different methods, attributable total costs ranged between

The Perception and Evaluation of Visual Art

9310 to

Cooperative strategies to reduce ambulance diversion

21,013, variable costs were

A Simulation Model to Compare Strategies for the Reduction of Health-Care Associated Infections

1581 to

Attitudes and beliefs about hand hygiene among paediatric residents: a qualitative study

6824, LOS was 5.9 to 9.6 days, and attributable mortality was 6.1%. The semi-log transformation regression indicated that HAI doubles hospital cost. The totals for 159 patients were

An analysis of the New York University Emergency Department Algorithm's suitability for use in gauging changes in ED usage patterns.

1.48 to

Adverse events associated with medium‐ and long‐term use of opioids for chronic non‐cancer pain: an overview of Cochrane Reviews

3.34 million in medical cost and

Vitamin D levels and deficiency with different occupations: a systematic review

5.27 million for premature death. Excess LOS totaled 844 to 1373 hospital days. Conclusions:Costs for HAI were considerable from hospital and societal perspectives. This suggests that HAI prevention expenditures would be balanced by savings in medical costs, lives saved and available hospital days that could be used by overcrowded hospitals to enhance available services. Our results obtained by applying different economic methods to a single detailed dataset may inform future cost analyses.

High‐dose opioids for chronic non‐cancer pain: an overview of Cochrane Reviews

Visual art is a complex stimulus. Drawing on extant theory that the interplay of affect and cognition evoked by a stimulus drives evaluations, we develop a generalizable model for the perception and evaluation of visual art. In three stages, we develop scaled measurements for the affective and cognitive components involved in the perception of visual art and present a structural equation model that integrates these components in art evaluation.

Homogeneity of Degree in Complex Social Networks as a Collective Good

Overcrowding in the emergency departments (ED) has led to an increase in the use of ambulance diversion (AD), during which a hospital formally is not accepting patients by ambulance. We use a number of tools to considers methods by which hospitals in a metro area may cooperate to reduce diversion, including contracts and pressure from outside regulators. The tools include a birth-death process, discrete event simulations, agent-based simulation model, and some game theory to examine the potential for cooperative strategies. We use data to suggest a functional form for the payoff of such games. We find that a centralized form of routing is needed, as voluntary cooperation does not appear to be robust in the presence of noise or strategic behavior, and ethical considerations also have a significant impact.