A good graph can often tell a story better than words. I think graphs are great to explain and demonstrate things in a colorful, easy to understand fashion.
This post is something I like to start off postings from time to time, a series I shall call ‘Graph Story’, about stories of patients who come and go in our hospitals through graphs from all that data you as Health Information Management (HIM) / Medical Records (MR) practitioners so routinely churn out – through graphs I can source from the kind Internet.
The following Graph Story 1 kicks off this series of Graph Story, and this Graph Story is a graph story about Average Length of Stay and Average Charges.
Graph credit : Healthcare Cost & Utilization Project (HCUP) Facts and Figures: Statistics on Hospital-Based Care in the United States, 2005
The solid line in the graph represents mean expected charges for hospitalisation
- Generally longer lengths of stay will be associated with higher average charges but mental health conditions (impulse control disorders, schizophrenia, and pre-adult mental disorders) proved the exception rather than the rule as these kind of patients stayed longer in hospital but were charged the lowest charges
- Infants with infant respiratory distress syndrome and premature birth and low birth weight consumed most of the hospital’s resources
- Most conditions stayed close to the mean charges but in the lower rungs of the straight line (notice the crowding around this line near the bottom of the line)
- Conditions treated with expensive technology or requiring intensive care including spinal cord injuries, heart valve disorders, cardiac and circulatory disorders, and leukemia hovered above the mean expected charges for hospitalisation, but such patients did not stay too long in hospital
