Adjusting health spending for the presence of comorbidities: an application to United States national inpatient data

Background One of the major challenges in estimating health carespending spent on each causeof illness is allocating spending for a health careevent to a single causeof illness in the presence of comorbidities. Comorbidities, the secondary diagnoses, are common across many causesof illness and often correlate with worse health outcomes and more expensive health care. In this study, we propose a method for measuring the average spending for each causeof illness with and without comorbidities.