Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
An interesting article by Mor (2023) examines the history of the requirement for a 3-day hospital stay for Medicare to cover a skilled nursing facility (SNF) transfer. The 3-day requirement: …was introduced very early in the history of the Medicare SNF benefit at a time when most nursing homes (NHs) offered primarily custodial care and…
No, this is not coming nation-wide, but it may be on its way in California. Kaiser Health News reports: A provision in California’s newly approved state budget will eliminate the asset test for the 2 million Californians enrolled in both Medi-Cal and Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older and people…
There are a few sub-questions we need to break down to answer before answering this one larger question. These sub-questions include: Is nursing staff turnover at nursing homes a big problem? Is nursing staff turnover correlated with quality of care? Does using nursing staff turnover as a quality metric provide the right incentives? A paper…
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…
An interesting article on the Marketplace Morning Report last week dives into the topic. Hundreds of nursing homes around the country have shut down leaving states to deal with what to do with people who need long term care…In Massachusetts, lawmakers have extended a $50 million lifeline to keep some nursing homes open. One nursing…
As the U.S. ages, more and more individuals have chronic conditions or functional limitations which may at some point require senior housing, such as independent or assisted living facilities and nursing homes. The question is, will individuals be able to afford this type of housing? According to a paper by Pearson et al. (2019), the…
In the past few weeks, I discussed how well Hospital Compare does on measuring the quality of hospital care (see here and here). Now, I turn to how well Nursing Home Compare does on truly measuring quality of care. A study by Brauner et al. (2018) attempts to answer this question. They compare the quality…
One idea is to provide additional funding for both formal and informal caregiving services. For instance, one could subsidize nursing homes or home health agencies on the formal side; for informal caregiving, one could give stipends to individuals to care for their elderly parents. The question is, does this implementation actually work? This is the…
There have been a number of studies that have examined how publicly reporting quality ratings (for health plans, physicians, hospitals or other health care providers) affects market share. Less attention has been paid to the effect of measured quality on health care prices. A paper by Huang and Hirth (2016) aim to answer just this…
Many people have feared that robots, computers, and other forms of technology will take people’s jobs. Conventional wisdom holds that healthcare workers have been largely immune from these technological changes to date. However, a new paper from Lu, Rui and Seidmann examines whether technological advances–specifically computerized provider order entry (CPOE)–affects employment at nursing homes. Using…