A nationwide study, “Uncovering Waste in U.S. Healthcare”, from authors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finds that spending on post-acute care in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) provides a key signal of inefficiency in the health care system, leading to higher spending and lower patient survival.
It’s not yet entirely clear whether mortality for patients in this study was hastened by poor initial hospital care leading to the need for SNF care, or by poor quality SNF care.
“We can’t really attribute our finding to one or the other. If it’s the SNFs that are poor quality, that could explain why we’re finding that that type of spending is inefficient, in the sense that we’re spending more and getting worse outcomes. Or it could reflect poor quality on the inpatient side: the patients just aren’t ready to go home because they got poor quality while they were in the hospital, so they need to rely on SNFs for post-acute care”, said co-author John Graves, Ph.D., assistant professor of Health Policy and Medicine.
