Prevalence and Costs of Discharge Diagnoses in Inpatient General Internal Medicine: a Multi-center Cross-sectional Study

Among 148,442 admissions, the most common primary discharge diagnoses were heart failure (5.1%), pneumonia (5.0%), urinary tract infection (4.6%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (4.5%), and stroke (4.4%). The prevalence of the 20 most common conditions was significantly correlated across hospitals (correlation coefficients ranging from 0.55 to 0.95, p ≤ 0.01 for all comparisons). No single condition represented more than 5.1% of all admissions or more than 7.9% of admissions at any hospital site. The costliest conditions were stroke (median cost $7122, interquartile range 5587–12,354, total cost $94,199,422, representing 6.0% of all costs) and the group of delirium, dementia, and cognitive disorders (median cost $12,831, IQR 9539–17,509, total cost $77,372,541, representing 4.9% of all costs). The 10 most common conditions accounted for only 36.2% of hospitalizations and 36.8% of total costs. The remaining hospitalizations included 223 different CCS conditions.