Use of Long-Term Acute-Care Hospitals on the Rise in the U.S.

In the U.S., long-term acute-care hospitals have emerged as a care model for patients who are recovering from critical illnesses. However, we know little about patterns of use for such institutions at the national level.

Researchers performed a retrospective cohort study using data from 1997 to 2006 for fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries. Despite a 14% decline in the overall number of intensive care unit admissions during the study period, the annual number of critical care hospitalizations that ended in transfer to long-term acute-care hospitals increased from fewer than 14,000 (0.7%) to more than 40,000 (2.5%). The number of long-term acute-care hospitals increased at a mean rate of 8.8% annually, from 192 in 1997 to 408 in 2006. One-y…