Rates And In patient Nursing Care

摘要

In their paper addressing payment rates for inpatient cardiovascular services (Jan/Feb 07), Kevin Hayes and colleagues overlook an obvious source of variability in inpatient spending: nursing care. Overall, nursing contributes 44 percent of direct patient costs and makes up 42.9 percent of all hospital labor. Nursing care is subsumed within routine and intensive care cost centers, which make up nearly half of all costs in the revised inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS), and is billed using fixed daily "room and board" charges.