Medicare Rule May Needlessly Extend Some Hospital Stays
BY LISA RAPAPORT
(Reuters Health) - A decades old Medicare rule requiring a three-day hospital stay before patients can transfer to skilled nursing facilities may needlessly prolong hospitalizations, a study suggests.
Researchers compared the average time patients were hospitalized between 2006 and 2010 in privately administered Medicare Advantage health plans that either stuck to this rule or allowed people to transfer to skilled nursing facilities sooner.
Lengths of hospital stays increased with the rule in place and declined when it was waived, the study found.
“The three-day stay rule may inappropriately lengthen the time spent in a hospital for patients who could be transferred to a skilled nursing facility earlier,” senior author Dr. Amal Trivedi, a health policy researcher at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said by email.
This minimum-stay rule dates back to the 1960s, when patients typically remained in the hospital for nearly two weeks, and three days was the minimum time needed to evaluate them and plan their post-hospital care, Trivedi and colleagues note in the journal Health Affairs.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/04/us-health-medicare-hospital-rule-idUSKCN0Q929E20150804
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