• Elizabeth M Viglianti, Sean M Bagshaw, Rinaldo Bellomo, Joanne McPeake, Xiao Qing Wang, Sarah Seelye, and Theodore J Iwashyna.
• Department of Internal Medicine Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, University of Michigan, 2800 Plymouth Road NCRC Building 14, G100-35, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA. eviglian@med.umich.edu.
• Intensive Care Med. 2020 Aug 1; 46 (8): 1567-1575.

PurposePatients with persistent critical illness may account for up to half of all intensive care unit (ICU) bed-days. It is unknown if there is hospital variation in the development of persistent critical illness and if hospital performance affects the incidence of persistent critical illness.MethodsThis is a retrospective analysis of Veterans admitted to the Veterans Administration (VA) ICUs from 2015 to 2017. Hospital performance was defined by the risk- and reliability-adjusted 30-day mortality. Persistent critical illness was defined as an ICU length of stay of at least 11 days. We used 2-level multilevel logistic regression models to assess variation in risk- and reliability-adjusted probabilities in the development of persistent critical illness.ResultsIn the analysis of 100 hospitals which encompassed 153,512 hospitalizations, 4.9% (N = 7640/153,512) developed persistent critical illness. There was variation in the development of persistent critical illness despite controlling for patient characteristics (intraclass correlation: 0.067, 95% CI 0.049-0.091). Hospitals with higher risk- and reliability-adjusted 30-day mortality had higher probabilities of developing persistent critical illness (predicted probability: 0.057, 95% CI 0.051-0.063, p < 0.01) compared to those with lower risk- and reliability-adjusted 30-day mortality (predicted probability: 0.046, 95% CI 0.041-0.051, p < 0.01). The median odds ratio was 1.4 (95% CI 1.33-1.49) implying that, for two patients with the same physiology on admission at two different VA hospitals, the patient admitted to the hospital with higher adjusted mortality would have 40% greater odds of developing persistent critical illness.ConclusionHospitals with higher risk- and reliability-adjusted 30-day mortality have a higher probability of developing persistent critical illness. Understanding the drivers of this variation may identify modifiable factors contributing to the development of persistent critical illness.

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