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Special Reports |
AW Heinemann, PhD, ABPP (Rp), FACRM, is Professor, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, and Director, Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, 345 E Superior St, Chicago, IL 60611-2654 (USA)
Address all correspondence and reprint requests to Dr Heinemann at: a-heinemann{at}northwestern.edu
| Abstract |
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Key Words: Health policy, Outcome and process assessment (health care), Outcomes research, Rehabilitation.
© 2007 American Physical Therapy Association and the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. By prior agreement, this document also appears in American Journal of Occupational Therapy, American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Assistive Technology, Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation, Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine, OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health, and Topics in Stroke Rehabilitation.
| Introduction |
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Over the past 20 years, the costs of postacute care (PAC) services, including postacute rehabilitation services, have grown much faster than overall inflation, reflecting an increased demand for services and growth in number of providers. The US Congress passed a series of laws (eg, Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Balanced Budget Refinement Act of 1999, Deficit Reduction Act of 2005) intended to reduce Medicare's PAC expenditures by establishing and refining PPSs for rehabilitation hospitals, nursing homes, long-term care hospitals (LTCHs), and home health agencies (HHAs).
Changing payment mechanisms alters providers incentives and indirectly the organization and availability of PAC. The consequences of payment changes on Medicare beneficiaries access to high-quality rehabilitation services, independence, and quality of life are unknown. Research on access to, organization of, and effectiveness of rehabilitation services is needed in order to understand the consequences of new payment mechanisms.
Rehabilitation-focused health services research has concentrated on patients natural recovery in single types of rehabilitation settings—rehabilitation hospitals and units, SNFs, LTCHs, and HHAs. It is often too expensive and unfeasible to evaluate costs and benefits of rehabilitation across sites of care, let alone specific paths of care, such as from hospitals to nursing homes to home. We know that most patients functional independence improves during rehabilitation, but we know little about the "active ingredients" of rehabilitation and which types of patients are best suited for which setting so that optimal outcomes are achieved at a reasonable cost.
Comparing outcomes across postacute settings has been hampered by the lack of a common outcome assessment instrument across settings, or a cross-walk between the instruments used by rehabilitation hospitals, SNFs, LTCHs, and home health agencies (HHAs). Imagine if Maryland's weights and measures differed from California's and Illinois's and Texas's—and we had no way to convert their measures. With only a bit of hyperbole, this is the situation Medicare finds itself in when trying to evaluate the relative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of rehabilitation hospitals, nursing homes, LTCHs, and HHAs.
In the absence of scientific evidence and a way to compare outcomes across settings, Medicare has promulgated rules that limit access to inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs). The so-called "75% rule" and Medicare fiscal intermediaries "local coverage determinations" are based on expert opinion and on a dearth of scientific evidence. In developing these regulations, Medicare was dependent on anecdotal information. While the 75% rule was written to distinguish rehabilitation hospitals and units from acute care hospitals, Medicare revised IRF regulations to require explicit documentation of medical necessity and adopted the 75% rule to limit the types of patients admitted. Beneficiaries access to rehabilitation services could suffer if the truism that "the absence of evidence of effectiveness does not imply evidence of absence of effectiveness" is not recognized.
The need for expanded rehabilitation-focused health services research was addressed during a workshop in 2005 that was sponsored by the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation and Research (NCMRR) within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the CMS.2 Participants identified a number of research priorities, including a randomized controlled trial of rehabilitation contrasting inpatient rehabilitation with skilled nursing home rehabilitation for patients with hip fractures. Also identified was the need for research on intensive rehabilitation for patients with major joint replacements and those with cardiac and pulmonary conditions. Participants also called for studies to better characterize rehabilitation facilities. While director of NICHD, Duane Alexander, MD, promised to seek funding for targeted initiatives, he thought providers might have to provide protected time for investigators so they can participate in trials and help collect data for such a study and that providers could conduct their own small population studies without waiting for federal funding. The need for additional research that would inform health policy was stated clearly.
| Symposium Planning |
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The goal for the symposium was to serve as a catalyst for expanded research efforts on PAC rehabilitation so that relevant research can be used as the basis for policy and funding decisions. The planning committee sought to develop an agenda for research that supports an evidence base for PAC rehabilitation, including issues related to measurement and research design, access to PAC rehabilitation services, organization of rehabilitation services, and outcomes attained for beneficiaries of Medicare and other insurers. The objectives were: (1) to describe the current state of our knowledge regarding utilization, organization, and outcomes of postacute rehabilitation settings; (2) to identify methodologic and measurement challenges to conducting research in this area; (3) to foster the exchange of ideas among researchers, policymakers, industry representatives, funding agency staff, consumers, and members of advocacy groups; and (4) to identify critical issues related to setting, delivery, payment, and effectiveness of rehabilitation services that are of the highest priority for investigation.
The activities of the symposium were designed to help formulate a research and policy agenda and to stimulate policy discussions, to engage stakeholders who are involved in policy decisions, and to provide emphasis for the need for an evidence base for rational policymaking. Symposium organizers sought balance in perspectives of key stakeholders, including Congress, the CMS and private insurers, providers of rehabilitation services, patients and their advocates, and health service researchers.
The planning committee invited research and policy leaders to present plenary and track-specific state-of-the-science summary speakers, and rehabilitation researchers to provide reports on contemporary work funded by AMRPA, the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center, and other agencies. The planning committee invited 3 keynote speakers: former Senator Robert Dole; Laurence Wilson, Director, Chronic Care Policy Group, CMS; and Steven Tingus, Director, NIDRR. Four plenary speakers were invited to address each of the track themes, and articles for publication: speakers were Pamela Duncan and Craig Velozo3 (on measurement and methods), Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin4 (on access), Sally Kaplan5 (on service organization), and Robert Kane6 (on effectiveness) in this series were developed for the symposium. Four articles were commissioned to summarize the state-of-the-science and to provide commentary on the 24 work-in-progress presentations made at the symposium. Authors were Mark Johnston et al7 (on measurement and methods), Ken Ottenbacher and James E Graham8 (on access), Leighton Chan9 (on service organization), and Janet Prvu Bettger and Margaret Stineman10 (on effectiveness).
More than 270 participants represented 166 organizations, including the U.S. Congress, CMS, NIDRR, NCMRR, private insurers, providers of rehabilitation services, patients and their advocates, and health researchers located primarily in academic institutions. They attended presentations by the 3 keynote speakers, the 4 plenary speakers, and concurrent breakout presentations organized by track theme. In addition, 20 peer-reviewed poster presentations summarized recently completed research.
The 4 concurrent breakout sessions, which were facilitated by assigned leaders and reporters, included 24 work-in-progress presentations and 4 state-of-the-science summaries by leading researchers, followed by roundtable discussions. These discussions were used to help assure that all participants had input to the process. Discussion leaders explained that the purpose of the discussion was to generate a report to the whole group that identified problems and solutions within the specific topic. Each breakout group then formulated research recommendations designed to improve our knowledge of how to organize and deliver effective rehabilitation services.
On the second day of the symposium, Barbara Gage, PhD,11 the principal investigator on the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005's Post Acute Care Demonstration project, described work under way to develop a common patient assessment instrument and study PAC payment reform for CMS.
Work groups developed recommendations for future research and reviewed their recommendations during a general session. The reporters (Patrick Murray, Dexanne Clohan, Joy Hammel, and Elizabeth Durkin) and discussion leaders (Bruce Gans, Greg Worsowicz, Dan Graves, and John Whyte) summarized the recommendations, which appear as the final report in the series.12
The remainder of this summary encapsulates key points from the plenary and state-of-the-science presentations followed by the track-specific research recommendations.
| Measurement and Methodology |
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Research priorities suggested by the measurement and methodology track participants included: develop validated measures of rehabilitation treatments, develop stronger cognitive and psychosocial outcome measures, develop long-term outcome measures, develop robust severity and selection adjusters across the PAC rehabilitation patient population, assess the role of environmental factors on patient outcomes, and continue development of evidence-based treatment guidelines.
| PAC Access |
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Research priorities related to access include projecting the PAC needs of the population and determining the range and geographic distribution of existing PAC providers. Research should be directed to understand better how access is influenced by attitudes about family dynamics, social support, and cultural differences, as well as assumptions about the value of improvement for a patient who will not achieve complete independence.
| Care Processes Across PAC |
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Chan9 described how postacute rehabilitation care is fragmented into 4 "silos" based on provider type. This lack of integration provides disincentives for delivering the most cost-effective sequence of postacute services. Each provider type has a unique Medicare payment system with unique incentives. For example, SNFs and HHAs have strong incentives to provide rehabilitation services, while IRFs and LTCHs have incentives to reduce their average length of stay. Little policy research has been reported about the impact of Medicare's payment systems on PAC services overall, and these policies continue to evolve. The goal in PAC should be to provide the right "dose" of care to the right patient at the right time in the right place.
Participants in the processes of care track suggested that future research include randomized trials that test individual components of PAC care to determine optimal intensity, duration, and frequency of interventions. To overcome the current barriers of conducting research across provider types, the experiences of other health care systems such as the Veterans Administration and Kaiser Permanente should be examined.
| PAC Rehabilitation Effectiveness |
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Participants in the effectiveness group suggested that future research should focus on what kind of treatment, or combination of services, is most effective in achieving specific outcomes for whom across the continuum of care. In addition, better measures of PAC rehabilitation treatments are needed so that key contents or treatments are identified and can be studied systematically and compared across the continuum of PAC. Participants expressed a strong need for a strategic research plan that is shared by payers, providers, research funders, and researchers; a common measurement time period; and collaboration between CMS, National Institutes of Health, the NIDRR, and the research community to provide flexibility within rigorously designed research protocols, because the PPS itself is a primary obstacle to treatment innovation.
| In Memory of 2 Rehabilitation Research Leaders |
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| Summary |
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The organizers and sponsors of this symposium trust that our goal of catalyzing expanded research on PAC rehabilitation is furthered by the publication of this set of articles. Our nation's health policy requires a solid base founded on compelling evidence. We look forward to the benefits of greater research attention to improved measurement and research design, access to PAC rehabilitation services, organization of rehabilitation services, and outcomes attained for patients, taxpayers, and Medicare and other insurers.
| Footnotes |
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Symposium planning committee members included Allen Heinemann, PhD, and Anne Deutsch, PhD (Rehabilitation Research and Training Center [RRTC] on Measuring Rehabilitation Outcomes and Effectiveness); Leighton Chan, MD, and Michael Munin, MD (American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation); Marcel P Dijkers, PhD, and Patrick Murray, MD, MS (American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine); Rochelle Archuleta (American Hospital Association); Mark Boles, MHA, CHE, and Carolyn Zollar, JD (American Medical Rehabilitation Providers Association); John Whyte, MD, PhD, and Greg Worsowicz, MD, MBA (Association of Academic Physiatrists); and Bruce Gans, MD, and John Melvin, MD (Foundation for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation). Staff support was provided by Kendall Stagg and Holly Demark (RRTC), Amy Cheatham, Ange Tapscott, and L. Owen Taggart (AMPRA) and David Stover, MS (Futures in Rehabilitation Management).
The editorial assistance of Marcel Dijkers and Anne Deutsch is deeply appreciated. Additional comments were provided by John Whyte, Patrick Murray, John Melvin, Dexanne Clohan, and Mark Boles.
Supported by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research through a Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Measuring Rehabilitation Outcomes and Effectiveness grant (grant no. H133B040032).
No commercial party having a direct financial interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit upon the author or upon any organization with which the author is associated.
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