Assessment of inappropriate hospital stays in a cardiology department.

One of the fundamental ways of increasing hospital efficiency is to ensure that unnecessary hospital stays are avoided. To date, no study on this topic has been published by any cardiology department in Spain. We performed a retrospective observational analytical study to determine the rate of unnecessary hospital stays. Data were collected in accordance with the Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol (AEP). The rate of inappropriate stays was 27 per 100 patient-days. Multivariate analysis showed that the factors associated with inappropriate stays were older age-group, stays longer than 7 days, and days during the last third of the stay. The most frequent causes of inappropriate stays were delays in performing diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and stays for procedures that could have been performed without hospital admission.