The identifier concept: clinical variables to manage costs for surgical patients.

Previous studies at Long Island Jewish Medical Center had shown that certain clinical variables (identifiers) would differentiate hospital charges within surgical diagnosis-related groups (DRGs). This current project demonstrated that the clinical variables of mode of admission (emergency versus nonemergency), blood transfusion, and surgical intensive care unit admission could stratify both differences in severity of illness and charges for patients in general surgical DRGs. These findings suggest that these three identifiers may be useful to physicians and hospital administrators in evaluating surgical patients for differences in resource consumption during their hospitalization, for better management of hospital-based inpatient costs.