Researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, crunched the numbers for rates of return of building single-patient rooms or converting existing multi-patient rooms into private rooms, including long-term operational costs. Using a probabilistic approach, they reported that over a five-year period, the return on investment due to reduced cross contamination rates and cutting additional medical costs associated with higher infection rates would offset money spent on single-patient room construction or multi-patient room conversion.
“We showed that although single-patient rooms are more costly to build and operate, they can result in substantial savings compared with open-bay rooms – all of this by avoiding costs associated with hospital-acquired infections,” Hessam Sadatsafavi, Cornell University postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper, said in a statement.
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