A new report from the American Hospital Association and Vizient stated that “patients in the hospital for surgeries had better outcomes in 2024 than they did in 2019.”
The improvement aligned with both “better performance on patient safety metrics – such as reductions in infections and falls – [and] also with marked declines in three major surgical patient safety indicators: severe bleeding, sepsis, and respiratory failure.” These findings build on another report from last year “showing that hospitals and health systems performed better on key patient safety and quality measures in the first quarter of 2024 than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Hospitals’ efforts to improve safety led to “200,000 Americans hospitalized between April 2023 and March 2024 surviving episodes of care they wouldn’t have in 2019.” David Levine, senior vice president and chief medical officer for Vizient, said that health systems are improving outcomes by “leveraging advanced analytics and technology-driven insights” in their quest to “adapt and elevate surgical care.”
The report found that, in the first quarter of 2024, “hospitalized surgical patients were nearly 20% more likely to survive than expected…compared to patients in the fourth quarter of 2019.” Additionally, as an “increasing number of surgical procedures shift to outpatient or ambulatory settings, the surgical patients who remain hospitalized tend to have greater clinical complexity and require higher acuity care.” The average length of stay for hospitalized patients has “increased by nearly one full day over the past five years,” which reflects both that higher complexity and the “concerning trend among commercial insurers to delay discharges and deny coverage for appropriate post-acute care services.”
