A collaboration between nurses and doctors to help patients get discharged from a hospital to a skilled nursing facility lowered 30-day hospital re-admissions.
The Enhanced Care Program encourages collaboration between medical staff to discharge patients to skilled nursing homes (SNF). Here nurses are available around the clock. The program includes educational in-services for Skilled Nursing Home staff in addition to standard care.
Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles,analyzed the data to see if the program reduced 30-day hospital readmissions. The researchers show that patients who received care under the enhanced program were 29% less likely to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days compared to the control group.
The findings come as the Skilled Nursing Facility Value-Based Purchasing model takes effect in October 2018 October. SNFs will automatically lose 2% of their Medicare funding, which can be earned back by hitting certain quality benchmarks. And the 30-day readmission rate is a crucial metric under this new model.
SNFs have been getting calls for some time to participate in a program that will decrease hospital re-admissions. Indeed several post-acute care facilities are taking steps to track their patients, with the goal of keeping them from returning to the hospital.
The patients in the Cedars-Sinai study included all patients discharged from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to eight partner SNFs that were eligible for participation, according to the study abstract.