Measuring the incidence of hospital-acquired complications and their effect on length of stay using CHADx.

Objectives: To use an automated Classification of Hospital Acquired Diagnoses (CHADx) reporting system to report the incidence of hospital-acquired complications in inpatients and investigate the association between hospital-acquired complications and hospital length of stay (LOS) in multiday-stay patients.

Design: Retrospective cross-sectional study for calendar years 2010 and 2011.

Setting: South Metropolitan Health Service in Western Australia, which consists of two teaching and three non-teaching hospitals.

Main Outcome Measures: Incidence of hospital-acquired complications and mean LOS for multiday-stay patients.

Results: Of 436 841 inpatient separations, 29 172 (6.68%) had at least one hospital-acquired complication code assigned in the administrative data, and there were a total of 56 326 complication codes. The three most common complications were postprocedural complications; cardiovascular complications; and labour, delivery and postpartum complications. In the subset of data on multiday-stay patients, crude mean LOS was longer in separations for patients with hospital-acquired complications than in separations for those without such complications (17.4 days v 5.4 days). After adjusting for potential confounders, separations for patients with hospital-acquired complications had almost four times the mean LOS of separations for those without such complications (incident rate ratio, 3.84; 95% CI, 3.73-3.96; P < 0.001).

Conclusions: An automated CHADx reporting system can be used to collect data on patients with hospital-acquired complications. Such data can be used to increase emphasis on patient safety and quality of care and identify potential opportunities to reduce LOS.