Changes in skilled nursing and home health admissions associated with Medicare payment reforms and the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Shortly after Medicare implemented post-acute care payment reforms, the COVID-19 pandemic began, but little is known about how these reforms and the pandemic impacted admissions to the most common post-acute settings-skilled nursing facilities (SNF) and home health agencies (HHAs)-for the full Medicare fee-for-service population.

Methods

Using 100% of Medicare fee-for-service data, we conducted adjusted interrupted time series analyses of 31,730,994 hospital stays of all adult beneficiaries discharged alive from the hospital between 2018 and 2021 to examine whether payment reforms and the pandemic were associated with differences in admissions to SNFs and HHAs compared to pre-reform and pre-COVID (baseline) trends.

Results

At baseline, an average 18.0% of h

SUBMITTER: Prusynski RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11828681 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature