Abstract:

The presence of unnecessary hospitalization has aggravated the economic burden of patients, decreased the utilization efficiency of health resources, and reduced the supply efficiency of medical services. This paper undertakes the systemic review of relevant literatures on unnecessary hospitalization, and recognizes that the existing studies in China generally consider the hospital stay that can not provide material benefits to patients or achieve the expected results is unnecessary. On the other hand, the concept of unnecessary hospitalization is much wider in the foreign researches, considering in-patient stay with low cost-effectiveness is also unnecessary, and unnecessary hospitalization incorporates the low-effective and ineffective parts in the in-patient services. According to the estimation, the extent of latent economic burden resulting from unnecessary hospitalization is 10% to 15% of the government budget expenditure on health care. Facing the existence of overuse and underuse of health care, it should be a focus to conduct the unnecessary hospitalization research and reduce unnecessary services without compromising the quality of inpatient services, in order to further improve the provision efficiency of medical services, optimize the medical resource allocation structure, and finally widen the equity and accessibility of health care.

Key words: hospital services, admission, hospital day, appropriateness