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Impact of Medicare's Nonpayment Program on Hospital-acquired Conditions.
Med Care. 2016 Dec 05;
Authors: Thirukumaran CP, Glance LG, Temkin-Greener H, Rosenthal MB, Li Y
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Medicare's Nonpayment Program of 2008 (hereafter called Program) withholds hospital reimbursement for costs related to hospital-acquired conditions (HACs). Little is known whether a hospital's Medicare patient load [quantified by the hospital's Medicare utilization ratio (MUR), which is the proportion of inpatient days financed by Medicare] influences its response to the Program.
OBJECTIVE: To determine whether the Program was associated with changes in HAC incidence, and whether this association varies across hospitals with differential Medicare patient load.
RESEARCH DESIGN: Quasi-experimental study using difference-in-differences estimation. Incidence of HACs before and after Program implementation was compared across hospital MUR quartiles.
SUBJECTS: A total of 867,584 elderly Medicare stays for acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and stroke that were discharged from 159 New York State hospitals from 2005 to 2012.
MEASURES: For descriptive analysis, hospital-level mean HAC rates by month, MUR quartile, and Program phase are reported. For multivariate analysis, primary outcome is incidence of the any-or-none indicator for occurrence of at least 1 of 6 HACs. Secondary outcomes are the incidence of each HAC.
RESULTS: The Program was associated with decline in incidence of (i) any-or-none indicator among MUR quartile 2 hospitals (conditional odds ratio=0.57; 95% confidence interval, 0.38-0.87), and (ii) catheter-associated urinary tract infections among MUR quartile 3 hospitals (conditional odds ratio=0.30; 95% confidence interval, 0.12-0.75) as compared with MUR quartile 1 hospitals. Significant declines in certain HACs were noted in the stratified analysis.
CONCLUSIONS: The Program was associated with decline in incidence of selected HACs, and this decline was variably greater among hospitals with higher MUR.
PMID: 27922910 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]