Though occupancy rates at nursing homes have declined during recent years, one expert believes that could change as the “silver tsunami” begins to gain steam.
“I think you’re slowly seeing the ‘silver tsunami’ starting to rise but it won’t happen overnight — I think it will take another three-plus years to really get rolling,” Matthew Bavolack, the healthcare services leader for accounting and advisory firm Marcum LLP, said.
The firm’s HealthCare Services Group on Wednesday released its second annual Nursing Home Benchmark Study, which analyzes trends in the long-term care industry between 2014–2018.
The national average for nursing home occupancy dipped from 81.5% in 2017 to 80.78%, the report found. Overall, it slipped 2.95% during that five-year span.
The same trend also appeared in residents’ average length of stay, which declined from 117.57 days in 2014 to 110.21 days in 2018.
Occupancy stabilizing
Bavolack noted that nursing home occupancy has begun to stabilize in recent quarters.
“I’ve seen in the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020, a slow change in the occupancy rate. I think the industry has started to right-size itself, and I think in some areas of the country – for example, [in] specific pockets in Connecticut, we’re seeing a potential need for more beds, while in other areas of the state the occupancy rate is still low,” he told McKnight’s.
“So providers that have stabilized their operations and learned how to work within the frameworks of a new reimbursement system in [Patient Drive Payment Model] and are able to maintain correct staffing levels and operate efficiently, I believe will be standing and survive and be that much stronger in the future,” he added.
Changes under PDPM
The report also analyzed the possible changes providers and residents could see in therapy following PDPM.
Total therapy (physical, occupation and speech) staff hours per patient day decreased slightly on a national basis from 0.46 hours per patient day in 2017 to 0.44 hours in 2018.
Additionally, the average physical therapy minutes per Medicare A patient day increased to 52.3 minutes in 2018, up from 49.7 in 2017. Occupational therapy minutes per Medicare A day also increased from 45.7 average minutes per day in 2017 to 47.0 minutes in 2018.
“Under the [PDPM], we will see if therapy reimbursement changes will result in decreases to the above therapy statistics or if the necessity of maintaining high-quality measures negates the ability to decrease therapy utilization,” the report states.
Full findings from the 108-page document can be found here.
