> Hospitals are incentivized to diagnose malnutrition by the Inpatient Prospective Payment System, which uses Medicare Severity Diagnosis‐Related Groups to identify a “payment weight.” When severe malnutrition is included on a patient's diagnosis list, a major complication or comorbidity (MCC) classifier is almost always added to the hospitalization claim. 5 Adding an MCC classifier increases reimbursement
If you look at the table, there is almost no relationship between income and likelihood of being marked as a malnutrition case by the hospital receiving reimbursement. (top 25% of income = 20% of cases, bottom 25% of income = 30% of cases).
The median age of these people with severe malnutrition is 70 years old. This is completely consistent with the claim I made around dementia, especially when you consider these people are repeatedly hospitalized oftentimes.
The point I'm making is that we don't see people dying from malnutrition because they generally end up in hospital rather than dying. However, I also just saw that the article I linked excludes children below the age of 18.
It found around 6.4% of child hospital admissions were diagnosed with malnutrition in 2019.
This other article says there were around 1.6 million child hospital admissions in 2019, suggesting around 100k cases of malnutrition in hospital admissions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10616761/
Some of that will be due to newborn feeding difficulties, e.g. babies with tongue-tie or a challenging latch. But most parents will usually find a way to feed their baby before it gets to the hospitalisation stage.
> Hospitals are incentivized to diagnose malnutrition by the Inpatient Prospective Payment System, which uses Medicare Severity Diagnosis‐Related Groups to identify a “payment weight.” When severe malnutrition is included on a patient's diagnosis list, a major complication or comorbidity (MCC) classifier is almost always added to the hospitalization claim. 5 Adding an MCC classifier increases reimbursement
If you look at the table, there is almost no relationship between income and likelihood of being marked as a malnutrition case by the hospital receiving reimbursement. (top 25% of income = 20% of cases, bottom 25% of income = 30% of cases).
The median age of these people with severe malnutrition is 70 years old. This is completely consistent with the claim I made around dementia, especially when you consider these people are repeatedly hospitalized oftentimes.