National Trends in 30-Day Re-hospitalization Rates of Skilled Nursing Facilities with Disproportionate Shares of Racial Minorities and Dual Eligibles

Excerpt

Re-hospitalization of patients receiving post-acute care (PAC) in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) has emerged as a leading health policy issue. PAC is the greatest source of geographic variation in Medicare spending.¹ Among hospitalized Medicare fee-for-services beneficiaries, over 20% are discharged to SNFs² and nearly a quarter of these patients are re-hospitalized.³ SNFs are segregated along racial lines⁴ and previous research has shown that there are marked racial variations in the odds of re-hospitalization among select surgical patients discharged to these facilities.⁵ It is not clear how widespread racial disparities in re-hospitalizations among SNF patients are and whether other factors such as Medicaid participation influence the risk of them. We used a national dataset to examine risk-adjusted SNF re-hospitalization rates stratified by the racial composition and the proportion of Medicaid patients in these facilities. …