By Anubhav Kaul, MD and Sindhu Kubenderan

Critically ill Medicare patients, who are battling for stable health at the end of life, are victims of repeated hospitalizations, especially after being discharged to a skilled nursing facility (SNF).  The cycle of hospitalizations is an indicator of poor care coordination and discharge planning – causing the patient to get sicker after every “bounce back” to the hospital.  Total spending for SNF care was approximately $31 billion in 2011; with an estimated one in four patients being re-hospitalized within thirty days of discharge to a SNF.[1]

Each readmission leads to further test and treatments, higher health care costs, and most importantly, patient suffering.  It is hard to imagine that patients would prefer to spend their last few months of life shuttling from one healthcare setting to another and receiving aggressive interventions that have little benefit to their quality and longevity of life.  The heroic potential of medical care should not compromise the patient’s opportunity to die with dignity.   A hospital is not a place to die.

Medicare beneficiaries are eligible to receive post-acute care at SNFs, after a three day hospital admission stay.  SNFs provide skilled services such as post-medical or post-surgical rehabilitation, wound care, intravenous medication and necessities that support basic activities of daily living.  Medicare Part A covers the cost of SNF services for a maximum of 100 days, with a co-payment of $148/day assessed to the patient after the 20^th day.  If a patient stops receiving skilled care for more than 30 days, then a new three day hospital stay is required to qualify for the allotted SNF care days that remain on the original 100 day benefit.  However, if the patient stops receiving care for at least 60 days in a row, then the patient is eligible for a new 100 day benefit period after the required three day hospital admission.[1]  It is evident that the eligibility for the Medicare SNF benefit is dependent on hospitalizations – many of which may be a formality and a source of unnecessary costs.

Continue reading “The Bounce Back Effect”

By Bob Wachter, MD

In the past, neither hospitals nor practicing physicians were accustomed to being measured and judged. Aside from periodic inspections by the Joint Commission (for which they had years of notice and on which failures were rare), hospitals did not publicly report their quality data, and payment was based on volume, not performance.

Physicians endured an orgy of judgment during their formative years – in high school, college, medical school, and in residency and fellowship. But then it stopped, or at least it used to. At the tender age of 29 and having passed “the boards,” I remember the feeling of relief knowing that my professional work would never again be subject to the judgment of others.

In the past few years, all of that has changed, as society has found our healthcare “product” wanting and determined that the best way to spark improvement is to measure us, to report the measures publicly, and to pay differentially based on these measures. The strategy is sound, even if the measures are often not.

Continue reading “Measuring the Quality of Hospitals and Doctors: When Is Good Good Enough?”

By MIKE MIESEN

You’d be forgiven if, after reading last month’s Health Affairs, you came to the conclusion that all manner of wellness programs simply will not work; in it, a spate of articles documented myriad failures to make patients healthier, save money, or both.

Which is a shame, because – let’s face it – we need wellness programs to work and, in theory, they should. So I’d rather we figure out how to make wellness work. It seems that a combination of behavioral economics, technology, and networking theory provide a framework for creating, implementing, and sustaining programs to do just that.

Let’s define what we’re talking about. “Wellness program” is an umbrella term for a wide variety of initiatives – from paying for smoking cessation, to smartphone apps to track how much you walk or how well you comply with your plan of care, and everything in between. The term is almost too broad to be useful, but let’s go with it for now.

When we say “Wellness programs don’t work,” the word work does a lot of, well, work. If a wellness program makes people healthier but doesn’t save lives, is it “working”? What if it saves money but doesn’t make people healthier?

Continue reading “Wellness Programs Aren’t Working. Three Ideas That Could Help.”

By Jaan Sidorov, MD

When persons are admitted to a hospital, insurers’ payment rates are based on the diagnosis, not the number of days in the hospital (known as a “length of stay”).  As a result, once the admission is triggered, the hospital has important economic incentive to discharge the patient as quickly as possible. My physician colleagues used to refer to this as “treat, then street.”

Unfortunately, discharging patients too soon can result in readmissions.  That’s why I have agreed with others that diagnosis-based payment systems and a policy of “no pay” for readmissions were working at cross purposes. Unified bundled payment approaches like this seem to be a good start.

But that’s all theoretical.  What’s the science have to say?

Peter Kaboli and colleagues looked at the push-pull relationship between diagnosis-based payment incentives  and the likelihood of readmissions in a scientific paper just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The authors used the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital’s “Patient Treatment Files” to examine length of stay versus readmissions in 129 VA hospitals.  The sample consisted of over 4 million admissions and readmissions (defined as within 30 days and not involving another institution) from 1997 to 2010. The mean age started out at 63.8 years and increased to 65.5 years, while the proportion of persons aged 85 years or older increased from 2.5% to 8.8%. Over the years, admissions also grew more complicated with a higher rate of co-morbid conditions, such as diseases of the kidney (from 5% to 16%).

As length of stay went down, readmissions should have gone up, right?

Continue reading “Building Smarter Hospitals: The Widely Misunderstood Relationship Between Discharging Patients Too Early and the Likelihood of a 30 Day Readmission”

By Ashish Jha, MD

I’ve been getting emails about the NY Times piece and my quotation that the penalties for readmissions are “crazy”.  Its worth thinking about why the ACA gets hospital penalties on readmissions wrong, what we might do to fix it – and where our priorities should be.

A year ago, on a Saturday morning, I saw Mr. “Johnson” who was in the hospital with a pneumonia.  He was still breathing hard but tried to convince me that he was “better” and ready to go home.  I looked at his oxygenation level, which was borderline, and suggested he needed another couple of days in the hospital.  He looked crestfallen.  After a little prodding, he told me why he was anxious to go home:  his son, who had been serving in the Army in Afghanistan, was visiting for the weekend.  He hadn’t seen his son in a year and probably wouldn’t again for another year.  Mr. Johnson wanted to spend the weekend with his kid.

I remember sitting at his bedside, worrying that if we sent him home, there was a good chance he would need to come back.  Despite my worries, I knew I needed to do what was right by him.  I made clear that although he was not ready to go home, I was willing to send him home if we could make a deal.  He would have to call me multiple times over the weekend and be seen by someone on Monday.  Because it was Saturday, it was hard to arrange all the services he needed, but I got him a tank of oxygen to go home with, changed his antibiotics so he could be on an oral regimen (as opposed to IV) and arranged a Monday morning follow-up.  I also gave him my cell number and told him to call me regularly.

Continue reading “Is the Readmissions Penalty Off Base?”

By Jonathan Hill

The $200 billion skilled nursing and rehabilitation market is in the midst of a transformation and in a new world of ACOs and readmission penalties, we see these providers playing a significant role in helping hospitals reduce readmissions and providing patients with coordinated and professional care in a sub-acute environment.

In March 2012, the Medicare-Medicaid Coordination Office and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation announced the Initiative to Reduce Avoidable Hospitalization among Nursing Facility Residents. Through this initiative, CMS is partnering with seven organizations to implement strategies to reduce avoidable hospitalization for dual eligibles who are typically long-stay residents at nursing facilities. Each participant in the initiative is required to partner with a minimum of 15 dual eligible certified nursing facilities in the same state where the intervention will be implemented.

Continue reading “Skilled Nursing Providers Playing an Increasing Role in Reducing Hospital Re-admissions”