One-fifth of Medicare nursing home patients with advanced Alzheimer’s or other dementias were sent to hospitals or other nursing homes for questionable reasons in their final months, often enduring tube feeding and intensive care that prolonged their demise, a new study found.
Nursing homes may feel hospital care is warranted when a frail, elderly patient develops swallowing problems, pneumonia or a serious infection, but researchers suspect a different motive for many transfers: money. Medicare pays about three times the normal daily rate for nursing homes to take patients back after a brief hospitalization.
“I think that’s unfortunately a factor in what’s happening here,” said Dr. Joan Teno, a palliative care physician and health policy professor at Brown University. “A lot of this care just feels like in and out, in and out. You really have to question, is the health care system doing a good job or not.”
She is a co-author of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and done with researchers from Harvard University and Dartmouth Medical School.
Among the nearly 475,000 patients studied, 19 percent were moved for questionable reasons. The study provided no evidence that money motivated such transfers or that there was wrongdoing involved. However, the large variation that researchers saw from state to state suggests money may be playing a role.
Rates of such transfers varied from 2 percent in Alaska to more than 37 percent in Louisiana. In McAllen, Texas, 26 percent of study participants had multiple hospitalizations for urinary infections, pneumonia or dehydration – conditions that usually can be treated in a nursing home. That compares to just 1 percent of patients in Grand Junction, Colo.
The researchers used Medicare records from 2000 through 2007 to identify “burdensome” transitions of care, including moving patients in the last three days of life.
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