Patient characteristics predictive of treatment costs on inpatient psychiatric wards.

A study to determine patient characteristics that are predictive of treatment costs was conducted at the Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital of the University of California, Los Angeles. Using nursing care time utilized and length of stay as measures of resource consumption, the study identified several characteristics, such as age and the presence of medical comorbidities, that are predictive of the costs of delivering care. Besides providing information valuable to administrators for product costing, the results of the study augment recent research demonstrating the inadequacy of relying on diagnosis alone--as is the case for psychiatric services under the current Medicare prospective payment system--to predict resource consumption.