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Are you trying to calculate the length of stay for a patient or other individual using Excel? With this guide, you’ll learn how to easily and accurately calculate length of stay using Excel. We’ll give you step-by-step instructions for entering dates and times into Excel and how to create a formula to calculate the length of stay. By the end of this guide, you’ll have the knowledge and skills needed to efficiently calculate the length of stay in Excel. Let’s get started!
You can use the following formula to calculate the length of stay in Excel:
=IF(C2=B2, 1, C2-B2)
This particular formula calculates the number of days between the starting date in cell B2 and the ending date in cell C2.
Note: If the starting date and ending date happen to be on the same day, then the formula returns a value of 1 to indicate that the length of stay is 1 day.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: How to Calculate Length of Stay in Excel
Suppose we have the following dataset in Excel that shows the admission date and discharge date for various patients at some hospital:
To calculate the length of stay for the first patient, we can type the following formula into cell D2:
=IF(C2=B2, 1, C2-B2)
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column D:
Column D now shows the length of stay for each patient.
For example:
- Andy stayed for 3 days.
- Bob stayed for 4 days.
- Chad stay for 1 day.
And so on.
Note that patients who were admitted and discharged on the same day have a length of stay of 1 day.
- D14: =SUM(D2:D13)
- D15: =AVERAGE(D2:D13)
The following screenshot shows how to use these formulas in practice:
From the output we can see:
- The total length of stay for all patients was 152 days.
- The average length of stay per patient was 12.67 days.