When talking shop with healthcare wonks, it’s hard to avoid hearing the word “partnership.”
Take the ever-evolving acute/post-acute relationship. Where the two sides have sometimes been adversaries when it comes to funding and other precious resources (ahem, RNs), it’s never been more apparent that the two provider types need each other to survive.
This week, the American Hospital Association sent two strongly worded letters to Congress, urging members to continue efforts to overturn a federal staffing rule enacted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Your problems, they know, are their problems too. And when both of you are hurting, your patients will too — especially if nursing home closures come to bear as predicted.
As we’ve reported here at McKnight’s in a series of recent articles, providers are getting ever-more creative and finding ways to collaborate — delivering better results than either organization could achieve on its own.
And that can’t stop now, even if those old fears about fighting over the same workers come to a fresh, new head.
In a webinar Tuesday on the hospital discharge crisis, ATI’s Fred Bentley noted that hospital backlog lengths across the US actually had been declining steadily for decades before the onset of the pandemic. True logjams may be easing in some places, but there is no sign of the backlogs going away without innovations that lead to new interventions, my colleague Josh Henreckson reports.
The bottom line, said Bentley: Hospitals, post-acute care providers, state governments and other providers all will need to collaborate to address complex problems.
In its letters against the nursing home staffing mandate, AHA expressed concerns that new CMS requirements would stymie innovation in care delivery and further limit nursing home capacity.
“Even more troubling, this final rule could lead to delays in urgent medical care as patients coming into hospital emergency departments may experience longer waits as EDs and inpatient beds are occupied by patients awaiting nursing home placements,” AHA wrote.
It’s a strong and in many ways provable argument, but one that’s fallen on deaf ears too often in the bureaucrat community.
At a time when partnerships are indeed vital, the federal government and CMS in particular appear unready to move a hair’s breadth away from the great heights of their enforcement pedestal. Where providers have asked for clarity and assistance, CMS has offered more indecipherable guidance and a refusal to collaborate on its part.
Pushed to the precipice, will regulators let the system fall to new lows? Or will an agency crazy for value-based-care finally begin to see the value in working together to keep the doors open across the continuum?
Kimberly Marselas is senior editor of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.
