The number of days a patient stays at St. Charles Bend is lower than the statewide average for hospitals, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

A patient at St. Charles Bend stays an average of 4.1 days, compared to 4.9 days statewide, according to data released by the health authority on Wednesday. St. Charles Prineville and Madras also have less time than the statewide average.  By way of comparison, Oregon Health & Science University hospital average length of stay is 6.8 days, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

How long patients stay in a hospital is a widely used measure of hospitalization because the data encompasses overall care, according to the snapshot data from 2023 to 2024 provided by OHA.  Examining the hospital lengths of stay also can provide leaders with data to address trends like staffing shortages, changes in health needs in specific populations and resource limitations, said Franny White, Oregon Health Authority public affairs specialist. 

“When patients are in hospitals longer than they need to be, it impacts their care and the financial sustainability of hospitals, which often are not paid for those extra days,”said Lisa Goodman, Hospital Association of Oregon vice president of communications. “Longer lengths of stay are the canary in the coal mine, signaling deeper problems in the health care system.”

At St.Charles Health System, streamlining hospital stays has been a key component to being more efficient since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, said Alandra Johnson, health system spokeswoman. 

“When patients no longer need to be hospitalized, it is in their best interest to either move to a skilled nursing facility or be discharged home,” Johnson said. “This work is also important because discharging patients who are ready for a lower level of care means we can free up beds for those who do need to be in the hospital.”

Creating efficiencies also extends to patient times spent in the emergency department.

At St. Charles Bend, patients spent an average of 5.4 hours in the ER, the same as the statewide average, but far less than the OHSU hospital, where patients spent an average of 8.3 hours, according to the data. In fact, St. Charles Bend had the fourth highest number of discharges in 2023-2024 with 57,855 during this period, compared to 84,531 at Salem Hospital. 

“Increases in overall inpatient discharges, births and emergency room visits are clear indicators of Central Oregon’s continued population growth and increasing needs for health care services,” Johnson said. “We have invested in additional services and will continue to do so to serve our growing community.”

The health system is the only Level II trauma center that cares for severely injured patients east of the Cascades in Oregon, Johnson said. It operates hospitals in Bend, Redmond, Prineville and Madras and employs more than 5,000 people.  

The data is based upon hospital provided data on patients they discharge from emergency and hospital care. 

One bottleneck that has been identified by St. Charles and other hospitals is a shortage of skilled nursing facilities. When skilled nursing facilities are short staffed, they are unable to accept new patients, forcing the patients to remain in a hospital bed longer, White said.  In general it’s more costly to pay for a hospital stay than a skilled nursing facility bed.

Other data released Wednesday include:

• Medicaid was the leading source of insurance for hospitals and emergency departments statewide. At St. Charles Bend, however, Medicare was the payer for 32.8% of discharged patients, followed by Medicaid and then commercial or private insurance payments from 2019 to 2023, according to the data. 
• The most common diagnosis statewide of hospitalized patients receiving emergency care first before being admitted was sepsis, a complication of an infection.  The top five emergency department diagnosed illnesses that led to hospitalization were: sepsis, hypertensive heart and chronic kidney disease with heart failure, hyertensive heart disease with heart failure, acute kidney failure and COVID-19.
• In 2023, St. Charles Bend delivered 2,054 babies, down from 2,187 in 2021, a peak year at the Bend hospital for births over the past six years. Statewide there were 36,283 deliveries in 2023, up from 38,760 deliveries in 2021.