Post-Acute Care Admissions Among Medicare Beneficiaries with Disabilities During Payment Reform and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background And Objectives: Recent Medicare payment reforms aimed to improve post-acute access to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and home health agencies (HHAs) for patients with complex care needs, including beneficiaries with disabilities. Soon after reforms were implemented, the COVID-19 pandemic began, which disproportionately impacted older adults and people with disabilities. Leveraging Medicare administrative data to identify two distinct cohorts of beneficiaries with disabilities, this study explored changes in their SNF and HHA admission patterns during payment reform and COVID-19.

Changes in skilled nursing and home health admissions associated with Medicare payment reforms and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Shortly after Medicare implemented post-acute care payment reforms, the COVID-19 pandemic began, but little is known about how these reforms and the pandemic impacted admissions to the most common post-acute settings-skilled nursing facilities (SNF) and home health agencies (HHAs)-for the full Medicare fee-for-service population.

Methods: Using 100% of Medicare fee-for-service data, we conducted adjusted interrupted time series analyses of 31,730,994 hospital stays of all adult beneficiaries discharged alive from the hospital between 2018 and 2021 to examine whether payment reforms and the pandemic were associated with differences in admissions to SNFs and HHAs compared to pre-reform and pre-COVID (baseline) trends.

Results: At baseline, an average 18.

Skilled Nursing and Home Health Policy: A Primer for the Hospital Clinician.

This paper addresses the increasing challenges faced by hospital clinicians in coordinating and recommending postacute care for patients, focusing on issues related to access to the most common postacute services: skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and home health agencies (HHAs). In coordinating discharges, hospital clinicians have minimal information on care delivery in these settings. This knowledge gap is exacerbated by the disrupted continuum of patient care between acute care hospitals, SNFs, and HHAs.

Efforts to Support the Mental Health and Well-being of Nursing Home Staff: Insights From Leaders.

Objectives: The sustained stress and trauma experienced by frontline nursing home (NH) staff throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been described in health care literature and popular press. Yet, limited attention has been given to attempts to support NH staff. The objective of this study was to examine efforts to support the mental health and well-being of NH staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Communicative Participation Item Bank-Gender-Diverse Version: Item Bank Calibration and Short Form.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to calibrate an item set for a new version of the Communicative Participation Item Bank (CPIB) specifically for use with gender-diverse clients. This new version contains a new item stem as well as other minor wording changes from the original CPIB in order to be acceptable to gender-diverse respondents.

Method: Survey data on 47 candidate items were collected from 434 transgender individuals: 219 assigned female at birth (AFAB) and 215 assigned male at birth (AMAB).

Patient Characteristics and Treatment Patterns for Speech-Language Pathology Services in Skilled Nursing Facilities.

Purpose: Skilled nursing facility (SNF) care has historically been influenced by systemic issues that could impact speech-language pathology (SLP) service provision. However, there has been little study specifically on factors associated with SLP service provision in SNFs. Large administrative data sets are rarely analyzed in SLP research but can be used to understand real-world SLP services.

Understanding How Older Adults with Communication Difficulties Access Health Services: What We Can Learn from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS).

People with communication disorders face barriers to accessing safe and respectful healthcare. These barriers result in increased healthcare complications and inefficiencies, both of which contribute to increased healthcare costs. One obstacle to advocating for accommodations that could improve healthcare for this population is the absence of cost effectiveness studies of such accommodations specifically, as well as a paucity of data defining the needs of this population in general.