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ABSTRACT
We estimate the effect of hospital length of stay (LOS) on the probability of 30-day readmission for 516,768 patients hospitalized with heart failure in California from 2005 to 2011. We use hospital crowding as an instrumental variable to control for bias from omitted health characteristics. Our results suggest that the literature, which has for 30 years identified readmission rates increasing with LOS, has not controlled for omitted variable bias when estimating the benefits from a patient’s hospital stay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Funding
This work was supported by the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), under Award Number (U54 GM088491) from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences and an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (DP1OD003874). Dr Fred Korley provided invaluable help with interpreting diagnostic codes. Scott Levin gave many helpful comments on alternative model designs.