Amin AP, McNeely C, Spertus JA, et al. - Given a substantial burden of contrast-induced acute kidney injury (AKI), a common and severe complication of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), researchers sought to determine the incremental AKI costs after PCI. In addition, they investigated the departmental components of cost contributing to the incremental costs associated with AKI. From the Premier database, they analyzed 1,443,297 PCI patients at 518 US hospitals from January 2006 to December 2015 for this observational cross-sectional study. They identified AKI occurrence in 82,683 (5.73%) of the PCI patients. Those with AKI vs those without had higher hospitalization cost ($38,869, SD 42,583 vs $17,167 SD 13,994). After adjustment, AKI was associated with the incremental cost of $9,448 (95% CI $9,338-$9,558). Further, there was an independent correlation of AKI with an incremental length of stay of 3.6 days. AKI costs mainly comprised of room and board costs ($4,841). Extrapolated to the United States, findings infer an annual AKI cost burden of 411.3 million US$. Hence AKI was common in this national study of PCI patients and was independently correlated with ∼$10,000 incremental costs, inferring an abundant burden of AKI costs in US hospitals. Meaningful cost savings could be achieved via performing successful efforts to prevent AKI in patients undergoing PCI.