In terms of cost per life saved, the most cost-effective was pneumonia, at $167,000 per life. The least was sepsis, at $1.8 million per patient.

"Our treatments for sepsis don't seem to work," Rotherbeg said. "We've had lots and lots of treatments for sepsis, and none of them are very good. We're trying to come up with better treatments for sepsis, but it's a really hard disease."

But focusing only on cost per life saved is not the most useful metric, Rothberg argued: The cheapest, and greatest, reduction in mortality was for the oldest patients, those above 85 years old, as they had the higher mortality rates to begin with.

"If you want to drop the mortality rate at your hospital, the best thing to do is concentrate on the oldest patients, because they're the easiest ones to get mortality reduction on," Rothberg said. "But in terms of benefit to society, it's not necessarily the greatest benefit. If you keep the 95-year-old from dying of their heart attack, the next month they're dying from pneumonia. Whereas if you prevent a 50-year-old from dying of pneumonia, they could have a lot of years left."

Life-year Analysis

Breaking the data down to cost per life-year gained, a different picture emerged. For cost per life-year, the most effective for the elderly was treatments for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), at about $12,000 per life-year. For those ages 18 to 54 for this same condition, the cost was $60,000 per life-year, likely because for younger patients, doctors might be more likely to use aggressive surgical interventions, while elderly patients might just receive medication, which is cheaper, Rothberg said.

But Rothberg is careful to point out that because the data come from individual hospitalizations, the results of the study reflect only in-hospital mortality. For instance, although costs for treating heart failure went up a lot, some of the money could have been spent on implantable defibrillators, whose potential life-saving results would not be seen by this particular hospitalization.

"If I put in an implantable defibrillator, it's to take care of the next two years," Rothberg said. "This [study] only measures death during this hospitalization."

Nonetheless, he feels that the study should prompt a look into ways to better allocate money – such as by putting it in research where it could potentially save more lives.

"Some things we're doing aren't working," he said. “We should stop spending money on fancier treatments that don't work and maybe spend money researching treatments that might work."

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