Nutrition assessment outcomes: a strategy to improve health care.

Nutrition assessment performed as part of hospital admission protocol can significantly reduce length of stay, costs of care, and the incidence of readmission by efficiently identifying patients with malnutrition. As reported in more than 150 clinical studies, malnutrition is a health problem of huge magnitude, potentially affecting more than half of hospitalized patients in the United States. The laboratory director can optimize the use of visceral protein testing in nutrition assessment protocols to realize the greatest benefit for both patient and institution. The accurate identification of patients with protein calorie malnutrition allows the use of malnutrition ICD-9-CM codes to obtain higher reimbursement for the increased acuity of illness.