Study Links Post-acute Care Hospital Costs with Lower Survival Rates

Researchers from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a working paper online with the National Bureau of Economic Research detailing their wide-scale study on overall survival rates in hospitals, which often place patients in skilled nursing facilities (SNF) as a cost-saving measure following immediate care. Upon discovering lower, overall survival rates and recovery rates among those sent to SNFs, it now must be determined if this type of practice provides lower-quality health-care or if outside factors contribute. “We can’t really attribute our finding to one or the other. If it’s the SNFs that are poor quality, that could explain why we’re finding that that type of spending is inefficient, in the sense that we’re spending more and getting worse outcomes. Or it could reflect poor quality on the inpatient side: the patients just aren’t ready to go home because they got poor quality while they were in the hospital, so they need to rely on SNFs for post-acute care,” said the author. To learn more about this study, click here.