One fifth of Medicare nursing home patients with advanced Alzheimer’s or dementia were sent to hospitals for questionable reasons in their final months, often enduring tube feeding and intensive care.
Researchers suspect that it’s not a coincidence, since Medicare pays a nursing home about three times the normal daily rate when it takes patients back after brief hospitalizations. A group of researchers from Brown University, Harvard University and Dartmouth Medical School studied about 475,000 nursing home patients who had been transferred to hospitals. Among them, 19 percent were moved for questionable reasons.
Researchers suspect that it’s not a coincidence, s…