Introduction: While hospital care has always been one of the basic requirements, Payment Method of treatment is an important factor to create equity in utilization of care. On the other hand, length of stay is one of the key indicators in hospital performance showing the efficiency of hospital care in resource consumption. The purpose of this study was to survey the effect of Payment Method of Treatment cost on the patient length of stay in educational and health centers in Qazvin in 2014.
Methods: In this cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study, 640 samples were randomly selected from among inpatients' documents at Qazvin’s selected educational and health centers. Data entry form was used for data gathering and Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Mann Whitney and Kruskal- Wallis tests were used for data analysis.
 Results: The mean and standard deviation for inpatient length of stay were 5.454 and 6.143, respectively. Demographic factors such as age, occupation, marital status affected the length of stay (P <0.001). The maximum length of stay was related to the patients with insurance from the Committee of Help (8.8days) and the minimum length of stay belonged to the patients without any type of health insurance (3days). It was also found that basic and supplemental health insurance affected the patients length of stay.
 Conclusion: Concerning the limited resources of health system in hospital sector and the influence of Payment Method of treatment on patient length of stay, proper use of insurance for appropriate and adequate utilization of hospital care and reducing unnecessary accommodation are undoubtedly necessary.

Keywords: Length of stay, Treatment cost, Teaching hospital

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