Milwaukee Nursing Home Abuse Attorneys Share JAMA Findings
JAMA Report: Long-Term Acute Care Patients’ Survival Rate Falling
On behalf of Milwaukee personal injury attorney Ric Domnitz of Domnitz & Domnitz, S.C. posted in Nursing Home Abuse on Tuesday, June 15, 2010.
According to a recent study conducted by the Journal for the American Medical Association (JAMA), the use of long-term acute care hospitals by Medicare beneficiaries after hospitalization is on the rise but survival rates of these individuals has been steadily decreasing over time. According to the study, the one-year death rate for patients that were transferred to an acute care hospital after critical care was 50 percent (50.7 percent from 1997-2000 and 52.2 percent from 2004-2006). The report did not cover any statistics regarding nursing home abuse rates during this period.
The study also found that the number of long-term acute care hospitals increased from 192 to 408 from 1997 to 2006, an 8.8 percent increase per year. Furthermore, the number of patients increased from 13,732 to 40,353, while health care costs for these facilities grew to $1.32 billion from $484 million, during the same period.
The study was conducted “to gain insight into patterns of long-term acute care and how the characteristics of patients transferred into long-term acute care have evolved over time.” To investigate these issues, Jeremy Kahn, MD, MSc, from the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues examined all Medicare hospitalizations involving admission to an intensive care unit of an acute care, nonfederal hospital in the U.S. from 1997-2006.
As clarification, “long-term acute care hospitals serve as an alternative to general-surgical hospitals for patients recovering from severe acute illnesses.” These patients usually stay an average of 25 days or longer in these facilities and can receive more specialize care for certain illnesses.
The research findings were first published in the June 9th issue of the Journal for the American Medical Association.
Related Resources: JAMA report sees survival rates as poor
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