Where there is variation, there is room for improvement. The Institute of Medicine’s report on geographic variation in Medicare spending concluded that the largest contributor to overall spending variation is spending for post-acute care services.1 Furthermore, we know that a significant amount of overall spending is devoted to post-acute care. For example, for patients hospitalized with a flare-up of a chronic condition like COPD or heart failure, Medicare spends nearly as much on post-acute care and readmissions in the first 30 days after discharge as it does on the initial admission.1
What does this mean for hospitalists?
Numerous research articles and quality improvement projects have focused on what makes a good hospital discharge or hand off to the ‘next provider of care’; however, hospitalists are increasingly participating in value-based payment programs like accountable care organizations (ACOs), risk contracts, and bundled payments. This means they must begin to pay attention to the cost side of the value equation (quality divided by cost) as it relates to hospital discharge.
A day of home care represents a more cost-effective alternative than a day of care in a skilled nursing facility (SNF). Hospitalists who can identify those patients who are appropriate to send home with home health services—and who otherwise would have gone to a SNF—will serve the dual goals of improving patient experience and decreasing costs.
Hospitalists will need to develop a decision-making process that determines the appropriate level of care for the patient after discharge. The decision-making process should address questions like:
- What skilled services lead a patient to go to a SNF instead of home with home health?
- Which patients go to a SNF instead of home simply because they don’t have family or a caregiver to help them with activities of daily living?
- Are there services requiring a nurse or a therapist that can’t be delivered in the home?
Hospitalists also will need to develop a more intimate understanding of the following levels of care:
- Skilled nursing includes management of a nursing care plan, assessment of a patient’s changing condition, and services like wound care, infusion therapy, and management of medications, feeding or drainage tubes, and pain.
- Skilled rehabilitation refers to the array of services provided by physical, occupational, speech, and respiratory therapists.
- Custodial care, usually supplied by a home health aid or family member, includes help with activities of daily living (feeding, dressing, bathing, grooming, personal hygiene, and toileting).
It should be noted that most skilled nursing or therapy services can be delivered in the home setting if the patient’s custodial care needs are met—a big ‘if’ in some cases. Some patients go to a SNF because they require three or more skilled nursing or therapy services, and it is therefore impractical for them to go home.
Here are my suggestions to hospitalists seeking to reengineer the discharge process with the goals of “right-sizing” the number of patients who go to SNFs and optimizing the utilization of home healthcare services:
- Become familiar with the range of post-acute care providers and care coordination services in your community.
- Refer any patient who wishes to go home, either directly or after a SNF stay, for a home care evaluation. Home care agencies are experts in determining if and how patients can return home.
- If a need for help with activities of daily living is the major barrier to having a patient discharged to home, create a system in which case management develops a custodial care plan with the patient and caregivers during the inpatient stay. Currently, this step is delayed until well into the SNF stay and may prolong that stay. Such a plan includes a financial analysis, screening for Medicaid eligibility, and evaluating whether a family member can assume some or all of the custodial care needs.
- If a patient is being discharged to a SNF, review the list of needed services leading to the SNF transfer. Ask the case manager if these services can be provided in the home. If not, then why?
- Bed capacity permitting, consider keeping patients who are functionally improving in the hospital an extra day so they can be discharged directly home instead of to a SNF.2
