What is the average (daily?)cost of hospitalizing a newborn with
congenital problems(for 4 months)?

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Request for Question Clarification by ragingacademic-ga on 18 Dec 2002 16:03 PST

bsaltzman -

Is the newborn in the NICU?
There's a huge difference between NICU and "regular" hospitalizations.

thanks,
ragingacademic

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Clarification of Question by bsaltzman-ga on 18 Dec 2002 16:31 PST

Dear Raging,
I hope I've been able to cancel one of the dups.

I'd love to know an average for each, NICU days or peds days.

This hypothetical patient spent 1st 4 months of life hospitalized and
eventually died of sepsis from UTI. I understand that often the costs
are higher for infants who eventually succumb vs those who
recover(though this aspect isn't really that super important to me).
I'm looking for really ball-park estimates...like it cost ~$250,000,
or $500,000. I've called the local university hosp billing dept and
they could do nothing unless I provided all cpt codes for what was
utilized. Blue-cross-blue-shield couldn't tell me anything either. Not
sure why this is such a difficult question. I already did a moderate
search in Medline and didn't find a whole lot to answer the question.

Thanks for any help you can provide.
-Beth

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Request for Question Clarification by knowledge_seeker-ga on 19 Dec 2002 15:13 PST

Hi Beth,

I did a quick search to see if I could come up with any figures for
you, and I immediately realized we are missing one piece of critical
information --- what country are we researching?

Let us know --

-K~

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Clarification of Question by bsaltzman-ga on 19 Dec 2002 21:01 PST

USA.