Analysis of Hospital Admissions of Neurological Patients in the COVID-19 Era: Comparison Between Hospitals

ABSTRACT

In the last few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has strongly affected different hospital departments, revealing their major weaknesses. For this reason, this emergency has been a driver for healthcare transformation in a very short interval of time in order to optimize the resources, minimize costs and simultaneously increase the caring services, also limiting over-occupancy in wards, especially emergency ones. One of the main factors for assessing the efficiency of a department is associated with how long a patient stays in the facility (LOS). This bicentric study investigated how COVID-19 has modified the activity of the Complex Operative Unit (C.O.U.) of Neurology and Stroke of the University Hospital "San Giovanni di Dio e Ruggi d'Aragona” of Salerno (Italy) and the hospital A.O.R.N. "Antonio Cardarelli” of Naples (Italy). In the work data for the year 2019 (in the absence of Covid-19) and in the year of Covid-19 pandemic 2020 were considered. This work used the logistic regression technique to study the following variables age, gender, length of stay (LOS), relative weight of DRG and mode of discharge. The analysis shows that in 2020 there was a greater adequacy of admissions, with an increase in the relative weight of DRG. And the statistical analysis obtained the following significant variables gender, age, relative weight of DRG and discharge mode. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.