Hospital LOS

However, underestimation of outcome was most apparent in the prediction of hospital LOS for Japanese patients. It is standard and common practice in Japan to utilize the general floors for prolonged periods of recovery, producing hospital LOS times that are quite dissimilar to those in the United States. As Japanese hospital LOS was twice that predicted, the longer observed LOS could be expected to introduce a systematic bias producing a higher observed hospital mortality than predicted. canadian pharmacy levitra These differences highlight the advantages of developing country-specific predictive models designed to capture important differences in patient selection and resource utilization. Nevertheless, this does not preclude the utility of applying models developed in one country to gain insight into the relative performance of institutions within another nation as variation between predicted risk and observed outcomes are captured.