Care transitions between hospitals and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) are a vulnerable time for patients. The current health care climate of decreasing hospital length of stay, readmission penalties, and increasing patient complexity has made hospital care transitions an important safety concern. Suboptimal transitions across clinical settings can result in adverse events, inadequately controlled comorbidities, deficient patient and caregiver preparation for discharge, medication errors, relocation stress, and overall increased morbidity and mortality.1,2 Such care transitions also may generate unnecessary spending, including avoidable readmissions, emergency department utilization, and duplicative laboratory and imaging studies. Approximately 23% of patients admitted to SNFs are readmitted to acute care hospitals within 30 days, and these patients have increased mortality rates in risk-adjusted analyses. 3,4
Compounding the magnitude of this risk and vulnerability is the significant growth in the number of patients discharged to SNFs over the past 30 years. In 2013, more than 20% of Medicare patients discharged from acute care hospitals were destined for SNFs.5,6 Paradoxically, despite the increasing need for SNF providers, there is a shortage of clinicians with training in geriatrics or nursing home care.7 The result is a growing need to identify organizational systems to optimize physician practice in these settings, enhance quality of care, especially around transitions, and increase educational training opportunities in SNFs for future practitioners.
Many SNFs today are staffed by physicians and other licensed clinicians whose exclusive practice location is the nursing facility or possibly several such facilities. This prevailing model of care can isolate the physicians, depriving them of interaction with clinicians in other specialties, and can contribute to burnout.8 This model does not lend itself to academic scholarship, quality improvement (QI), and student or resident training, as each of these endeavors depends on interprofessional collaboration as well as access to an academic medical center with additional resources.9
Few studies have described innovative hospitalist rotation models from acute to subacute care. The Cleveland Clinic implemented the Connected Care model where hospital-employed physicians and advanced practice professionals integrated into postacute care and reduced the 30-day hospital readmission rate from SNFs from 28% to 22%.10 Goth and colleagues performed a comparative effectiveness trial between a postacute care hospitalist (PACH) model and a community-based physician model of nursing home care. They found that the institution of a PACH model in a nursing home was associated with a significant increase in laboratory costs, nonsignificant reduction in medication errors and pharmacy costs, and no improvement in fall rates.11 The conclusion was that the PACH model may lead to greater clinician involvement and that the potential decrease in pharmacy costs and medications errors may offset the costs associated with additional laboratory testing. Overall, there has been a lack of studies on the impact of these hospitalist rotation models from acute to subacute care on educational programs, QI activities, and the interprofessional environment.
To achieve a system in which physicians in a SNF can excel in these areas, Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System (VABHS) adopted a staffing model in which academic hospitalist physicians rotate between the inpatient hospital and subacute settings. This report describes the model structure, the varying roles of the physicians, and early indicators of its positive effects on educational programs, QI activities, and the interprofessional environment.