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.

Hospital and societal costs of antimicrobial-resistant infections in a Chicago teaching hospital: implications for antibiotic stewardship.

Background: Organisms resistant to antimicrobials continue to emerge and spread. This study was performed to measure the medical and societal cost attributable to antimicrobial-resistant infection (ARI).

Methods: A sample of high-risk hospitalized adult patients was selected.

Emergency care physicians' knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to surveillance for foodborne disease in the United States.

During the past decade, the incidence of certain bacterial pathogens that are commonly transmitted through food in the United States has decreased. Concurrently, the emergency department has become an increasingly common setting for health care. Because public health surveillance for bacterial foodborne diseases fundamentally depends on stool cultures, we conducted a survey of physicians who attended an emergency medicine conference to describe knowledge, attitudes, and practices among this provider population.

The cost of care for patients with HIV from the provider economic perspective.

Health care costs for HIV infection are often reported from the economic perspective of third party payors and little data exist to show how total costs are distributed across specific health service categories. We used a retrospective cohort design to measure total medical costs for 1 year in a randomly selected sample of 280 patients treated for HIV infection at an urban health care facility. Inpatient and outpatient costs were measured from the economic perspective of the health care provider.

The use of economic modeling to determine the hospital costs associated with nosocomial infections.

Hospital-associated infection is well recognized as a patient safety concern requiring preventive interventions. However, hospitals are closely monitoring expenditures and need accurate estimates of potential cost savings from such prevention programs. We used a retrospective cohort design and economic modeling to determine the excess cost from the hospital perspective for hospital-associated infection in a random sample of adult medical patients.