News: Study shows that many ICU admissions could be avoided

Intensive care units are expensive, invasive, and supposed to be reserved for the sickest hospital patients, but more than half the time, they're not needed, according to research from LA BioMed and UCLA, HealthLeaders Media reported.

Researchers examined all of the 808 ICU admissions from July 1, 2015 to June 15, 2016 at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, according to the study published. They found that more than half the patients could have been cared for in less-expensive and less-invasive settings.

Of the patients in the study, 23.4% were in need of close monitoring but not ICU-level care. Another 20.9% were critically ill but unlikely to recover because they had underlying illnesses or severity of acute illness. For another 8%, death was imminent or the same outcomes were expected in non-ICU care.

In addition, the researchers added up the number of days each of the patients in the study spent in ICU and found nearly 65% of the total number of days those patients spent in ICU were allocated to care that was considered discretionary monitoring, had a low likelihood of benefit despite critical illness, or would have been manageable in non-ICU settings.

Editor’s Note: A version of this article originally appeared in ACDIS’ sister publication, Health Leaders Media. Click here to read the original article.