Factors Associated with Hospital Length of Stay among Women’s Cancer Patients: Based on the In-depth Injury Patient Surveillance System Data

Abstract

Objectives: This study sought to evaluate factors associated with hospital length of stay (LOS) in four women’s cancer (ovarian, breast, uterine cervix and uterine corpus cancer) patients.Methods: The Korean National Hospital Discharge In-depth Injury Survey Data (2006-2017) collected by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used. We extracted 74,641 inpatients who were diagnosed with women’s cancer. We conducted a frequency analysis to analyze general characteristics of the study subjects for the four women’s cancers, and used the analysis of variance to compare the difference in the average LOS according to these characteristics. In addition, we performed Poisson regression analysis to evaluate the effects of demographic characteristics, medical institutions, medical use characteristics, and disease characteristics on the LOS in women’s cancer patients.Results: During the study period, the average LOS for each women’s cancer patients were 6.9 days for ovarian cancer, 6.0 days for breast cancer, 8.6 days for uterine cervical cancer, and 7.8 days for uterine corpus cancer. Among women’s cancers, cervical cancer patients had the longest average hospital stay. According to the Poisson regression analysis, it was found that pay method for medical expense (relative risk [RR] range: 1.019-1.498), admission route (RR range: 1.908-2.133), hospital residence (RR range: 0.698-1.068), the number of beds (RR range: 0.546-0.920), the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) severity (RR range: 1.139-1.529), and comorbidities have a significant influence on LOS for all women’s cancer patients.Conclusions: It is necessary to efficiently manage the LOS for women’s cancer patients in the future by considering the determinants of each women’s cancer identified in our study.