Assessing discharge to community outcomes in post-acute care settings

This presentation will describe the development of the Medicare fee-for-service claims-based Discharge to Community-Post Acute Care (PAC) measures for long-term care hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and inpatient rehabilitation facilities. These measures are required by the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act of 2014 (IMPACT Act), and proposed for inclusion in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ quality reporting programs. We will describe the definition of the discharge to community outcome, measure target population, measure risk adjusters, and observed and risk-standardized discharge to community rates in each PAC setting. Using national claims data, approximately 25% of LTCH patients, 44% of SNF residents, and 69% of IRF patients were discharged to the community. These measures are intended to provide actionable data to providers in their efforts to improve discharge to community rates. These measures are also intended to help patients and consumers make informed choices when selecting post-acute care providers.