An item in Tuesday’s Daily Update did not fully enough discuss the views of Dr. Andrew Kramer, head of the Division of Health Care Policy and Research at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, as he related them to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recently.
Kramer says increasing rehospitalization rates of skilled nursing residents is a “multifaceted problem.”
“Declining acute care hospital lengths of stay, insufficient reimbursement under the SNF PPS for nursing homes and physicians to treat patients with declining health in the nursing home, the current publicly reported quality measures that do not include readmission rates, and growing staffing shortages faced particularly by nursing homes” were all issues he suggested to MedPAC that may explain rising rehospitalization rates.
