Long-Term Acute Care Hospitals Extend ICU Capacity for COVID-19 Response and Recovery.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented novel challenges for the entire health-care continuum, requiring transformative changes to hospital and post-acute care, including clinical, administrative, and physical modifications to current standards of operations. Innovative use and adaptation of long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs) can safely and effectively care for patients during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A framework for the rapid changes, including increasing collaboration with external health-care organizations, creating new methods for enhanced communication, and modifying processes focused on patient safety and clinical outcomes, is described for a network of 94 LTACHs.

Optimizing laboratory test utilization in long-term acute care hospitals.

Laboratory tests can be considered inappropriate if overused or when repeated, unnecessary "routine" testing occurs. For chronically critically ill patients treated in long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs), inappropriate testing may result in unnecessary blood draws that could potentially harm patients or increase infections. A quality improvement initiative was designed to increase physician awareness of their patterns of lab utilization in the LTACH environment.

Use of a Central Catheter Maintenance Bundle in Long-Term Acute Care Hospitals.

Objective: Evidence-based guidelines have resulted in decreases in bloodstream infections associated with central catheters (CLABSIs) in hospital intensive care units. However, relatively little is known about CLABSI incidence and prevention in long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs).

Methods: A central catheter maintenance bundle was implemented in 30 LTACHs, and compliance with the bundle was tracked for 6 months.

Long-term acute care hospitals have low impact on medicare readmissions to short-term acute care hospitals.

The relative contribution of long-term acute care hospital (LTACH) to short-term acute care hospital (STACH) Medicare patient readmissions is important because of the high acuity of LTACH patients. A retrospective cohort study was conducted to determine the magnitude of LTACH Medicare heart failure (HF) and pneumonia (PN) inpatient readmissions to STACHs within 30 days of LTACH admission and the relative contribution of LTACH patient readmissions to each STACH's total readmissions. Seventy-five for-profit LTACHs and their associated host or primary referral STACHs were studied.