Document Type

Article

Original Publication Date

2014

Journal/Book/Conference Title

BioMed Research International

Volume

2014

Issue

Article ID 781670, 11 pages

DOI of Original Publication

10.1155/2014/781670

Comments

Originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/781670

Date of Submission

August 2014

Abstract

Management of hyperglycemia in hospitalized patients has a significant bearing on outcome, in terms of both morbidity and mortality. However, there are few national assessments of diabetes care during hospitalization which could serve as a baseline for change. This analysis of a large clinical database (74 million unique encounters corresponding to 17 million unique patients) was undertaken to provide such an assessment and to find future directions which might lead to improvements in patient safety. Almost 70,000 inpatient diabetes encounters were identified with sufficient detail for analysis. Multivariable logistic regression was used to fit the relationship between the measurement of HbA1c and early readmission while controlling for covariates such as demographics, severity and type of the disease, and type of admission. Results show that the measurement of HbA1c was performed infrequently (18.4%) in the inpatient setting. The statistical model suggests that the relationship between the probability of readmission and the HbA1c measurement depends on the primary diagnosis. The data suggest further that the greater attention to diabetes reflected in HbA1c determination may improve patient outcomes and lower cost of inpatient care.

Rights

Copyright © 2014 Beata Strack et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Is Part Of

VCU Computer Science Publications

781670.f1.zip (2851 kB)
Dataset as described in Sections 2.1 and 2.2 and in Table 1

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