The Association of ICU Acuity With Outcomes of Patients at Low Risk of Dying.

OBJECTIVE: Many ICU patients do not require critical care interventions. Whether aggressive care environments increase risks to low-acuity patients is unknown. We evaluated whether ICU acuity was associated with outcomes of low mortality-risk patients. We hypothesized that admission to high-acuity ICUs would be associated with worse outcomes. This hypothesis was based on two possibilities: 1) high-acuity ICUs may have a culture of aggressive therapy that could lead to potentially avoidable complications and 2) high-acuity ICUs may focus attention toward the many sicker patients and away from the fewer low-risk patients. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. SETTING: Three hundred twenty-two ICUs in 199 hospitals in the Philips eICU database between 2010 and 2015. PATIENTS: Adult ICU patients at low risk of dying, defined as an Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation-IVa-predicted mortality of 3% or less. EXPOSURE: ICU acuity, defined as the mean Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation IVa score of all admitted patients in a calendar year, stratified into quartiles. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: We used generalized estimating equations to test whether ICU acuity is independently associated with a primary outcome of ICU length of stay and secondary outcomes of hospital length of stay, hospital mortality, and discharge destination. The study included 381,997 low-risk patients. Mean ICU and hospital length of stay were 1.8 ± 2.1 and 5.2 ± 5.0 days, respectively. Mean Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation IVa-predicted hospital mortality was 1.6% ± 0.8%; actual hospital mortality was 0.7%. In adjusted analyses, admission to low-acuity ICUs was associated with worse outcomes compared with higher-acuity ICUs. Specifically, compared with the highest-acuity quartile, ICU length of stay in low-acuity ICUs was increased by 0.24 days; in medium-acuity ICUs by 0.16 days; and in high-acuity ICUs by 0.09 days (all p < 0.001). Similar patterns existed for hospital length of stay. Patients in lower-acuity ICUs had significantly higher hospital mortality (odds ratio, 1.28 [95% CI, 1.10-1.49] for low-; 1.24 [95% CI, 1.07-1.42] for medium-, and 1.14 [95% CI, 0.99-1.31] for high-acuity ICUs) and lower likelihood of discharge home (odds ratio, 0.86 [95% CI, 0.82-0.90] for low-, 0.88 [95% CI, 0.85-0.92] for medium-, and 0.95 [95% CI, 0.92-0.99] for high-acuity ICUs). CONCLUSIONS: Admission to high-acuity ICUs is associated with better outcomes among low mortality-risk patients. Future research should aim to understand factors that confer benefit to patients with different risk profiles.

The high cost of low-acuity ICU outliers.

Direct variable costs were determined on each hospital day for all patients with an intensive care unit (ICU) stay in four Phoenix-area hospital ICUs. Average daily direct variable cost in the four ICUs ranged from $1,436 to $1,759 and represented 69.4 percent and 45.7 percent of total hospital stay cost for medical and surgical patients, respectively. Daily ICU cost and length of stay (LOS) were higher in patients with higher ICU admission acuity of illness as measured by the APACHE risk prediction methodology; 16.2 percent of patients had an ICU stay in excess of six days, and these LOS outliers accounted for 56.7 percent of total ICU cost. While higher-acuity patients were more likely to be ICU LOS outliers, 11.1 percent of low-risk patients were outliers. The low-risk group included 69.4 percent of the ICU population and accounted for 47 percent of all LOS outliers. Low-risk LOS outliers accounted for 25.3 percent of ICU cost and incurred fivefold higher hospital stay costs and mortality rates. These data suggest that severity of illness is an important determinant of daily resource consumption and LOS, regardless of whether the patient arrives in the ICU with high acuity or develops complications that increase acuity. The finding that a substantial number of long-stay patients come into the ICU with low acuity and deteriorate after ICU admission is not widely recognized and represents an important opportunity to improve patient outcomes and lower costs. ICUs should consider adding low-risk LOS data to their quality and financial performance reports.

Remote ICU care programs: current status.

The desire to provide continuous intensivist management for all intensive care unit (ICU) patients in the face of a massive shortfall of available intensivists prompted the introduction of remote ICU care programs in 1999. The past several years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of health systems adopting this care model. These health systems have increased our understanding of both the ability of this new care model to improve clinical outcomes and the clinical processes that are required to achieve program quality goals. Health systems have begun to expand the scope of activities of the remote care team, capitalizing on the potential of this new operational and technology platform to leverage scarce personnel and achieve increases in both clinical effectiveness and provider efficiency. This review summarizes the current state of remote ICU care programs in the United States.

Severity scoring in the critically ill: part 1--interpretation and accuracy of outcome prediction scoring systems.

This review examines the use of scoring systems to assess ICU performance. APACHE (Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation), MPM (mortality probability model), and SAPS (simplified acute physiology score) are the three major ICU scoring systems in use today. Central to all three is the use of physiologic data for severity adjustment. Differences in the size, nature, and time horizon of the data set translate into minor differences in accuracy and difficulty of data abstraction. APACHE IV provides ICU and hospital predictions for mortality and length of stay, whereas MPM and SAPS only provide hospital mortality predictions (although new algorithms generated from MPM data elements may predict ICU length of stay adequately). The primary use of scoring systems is for assessing ICU performance, with the ratio of actual-to-predicted outcomes in the study cohort providing performance comparisons to the reference ICUs. The reliability of scoring system predictions depends on the completeness and accuracy of the abstracted data; accordingly, ICUs must implement robust data quality control processes. CIs of the ratios are inversely related to sample size, and care must be taken to avoid overinterpreting changes in outcomes. ICU structural and process issues also can affect scoring system performance measures. Despite good discrimination and calibration, scoring systems are used in only 10% to 15% of US ICUs. Without ICU performance data, there is little hope of improving quality and reducing costs. Current demands for transparency and computerization of documentation are likely to drive future use of ICU scoring systems.

Readmissions and death after ICU discharge: development and validation of two predictive models.

INTRODUCTION: Early discharge from the ICU is desirable because it shortens time in the ICU and reduces care costs, but can also increase the likelihood of ICU readmission and post-discharge unanticipated death if patients are discharged before they are stable. We postulated that, using eICU® Research Institute (eRI) data from >400 ICUs, we could develop robust models predictive of post-discharge death and readmission that may be incorporated into future clinical information systems (CIS) to assist ICU discharge planning. METHODS: Retrospective, multi-center, exploratory cohort study of ICU survivors within the eRI database between 1/1/2007 and 3/31/2011. EXCLUSION CRITERIA: DNR or care limitations at ICU discharge and discharge to location external to hospital. Patients were randomized (2∶1) to development and validation cohorts. Multivariable logistic regression was performed on a broad range of variables including: patient demographics, ICU admission diagnosis, admission severity of illness, laboratory values and physiologic variables present during the last 24 hours of the ICU stay. Multiple imputation was used to address missing data. The primary outcomes were the area under the receiver operator characteristic curves (auROC) in the validation cohorts for the models predicting readmission and death within 48 hours of ICU discharge. RESULTS: 469,976 and 234,987 patients representing 219 hospitals were in the development and validation cohorts. Early ICU readmission and death was experienced by 2.54% and 0.92% of all patients, respectively. The relationship between predictors and outcomes (death vs readmission) differed, justifying the need for separate models. The models for early readmission and death produced auROCs of 0.71 and 0.92, respectively. Both models calibrated well across risk groups. CONCLUSIONS: Our models for death and readmission after ICU discharge showed good to excellent discrimination and good calibration. Although prospective validation is warranted, we speculate that these models may have value in assisting clinicians with ICU discharge planning.

Severity scoring in the critically ill: part 2: maximizing value from outcome prediction scoring systems.

Part 2 of this review of ICU scoring systems examines how scoring system data should be used to assess ICU performance. There often are two different consumers of these data: lCU clinicians and quality leaders who seek to identify opportunities to improve quality of care and operational efficiency, and regulators, payors, and consumers who want to compare performance across facilities. The former need to know how to garner maximal insight into their care practices; this includes understanding how length of stay (LOS) relates to quality, analyzing the behavior of different subpopulations, and following trends over time. Segregating patients into low-, medium-, and high-risk populations is especially helpful, because care issues and outcomes may differ across this severity continuum. Also, LOS behaves paradoxically in high-risk patients (survivors often have longer LOS than nonsurvivors); failure to examine this subgroup separately can penalize ICUs with superior outcomes. Consumers of benchmarking data often focus on a single score, the standardized mortality ratio (SMR). However, simple SMRs are disproportionately affected by outcomes in high-risk patients, and differences in population composition, even when performance is otherwise identical, can result in different SMRs. Future benchmarking must incorporate strategies to adjust for differences in population composition and report performance separately for low-, medium- and high-acuity patients. Moreover, because many ICUs lack the resources to care for high-acuity patients (predicted mortality >50%), decisions about where patients should receive care must consider both ICU performance scores and their capacity to care for different types of patients.

Effect of a multiple-site intensive care unit telemedicine program on clinical and economic outcomes: an alternative paradigm for intensivist staffing.

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether a supplemental remote intensive care unit (ICU) care program, implemented by an integrated delivery network using a commercial telemedicine and information technology system, can improve clinical and economic performance across multiple ICUs. DESIGN: Before-and-after trial to assess the effect of adding the supplemental remote ICU telemedicine program. SETTING: Two adult ICUs of a large tertiary care hospital. PATIENTS: A total of 2,140 patients receiving ICU care between 1999 and 2001. INTERVENTIONS: The remote care program used intensivists and physician extenders to provide supplemental monitoring and management of ICU patients for 19 hrs/day (noon to 7 am) from a centralized, off-site facility (eICU). Supporting software, including electronic data display, physician note- and order-writing applications, and a computer-based decision-support tool, were available both in the ICU and at the remote site. Clinical and economic performance during 6 months of the remote intensivist program was compared with performance before the intervention. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Hospital mortality for ICU patients was lower during the period of remote ICU care (9.4% vs. 12.9%; relative risk, 0.73; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.55-0.95), and ICU length of stay was shorter (3.63 days [95% CI, 3.21-4.04] vs. 4.35 days [95% CI, 3.93-4.78]). Lower variable costs per case and higher hospital revenues (from increased case volumes) generated financial benefits in excess of program costs. CONCLUSIONS: The addition of a supplemental, telemedicine-based, remote intensivist program was associated with improved clinical outcomes and hospital financial performance. The magnitude of the improvements was similar to those reported in studies examining the impact of implementing on-site dedicated intensivist staffing models; however, factors other than the introduction of off-site intensivist staffing may have contributed to the observed results, including the introduction of computer-based tools and the increased focus on ICU performance. Although further studies are needed, the apparent success of this on-going multiple-site program, implemented with commercially available equipment, suggests that telemedicine may provide a means for hospitals to achieve quality improvements associated with intensivist care using fewer intensivists.