Improving care delivery in critical access hospitals: evaluating the quality environment and the 'critical' role of telemedicine on access and costs

[摘要] Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) – the predominant type of hospital operating in rural areas – play an integral role in the US healthcare system, providing care for over 7 million rural residents each year who might otherwise have no local access to urgent care or inpatient services. This dissertation examines three aspects of care delivery in CAHs – effectiveness, cost/efficiency, and access – each of which has separate implications for policy and practice. The first study addresses effectiveness and evaluates the performance of CAHs on specific patient safety indicators compared to small Prospective Payment System (PPS) hospitals. A total of 35,674 discharges from 136 non-federal general hospitals with fewer than 50 beds were included in the analyses: 14,296 from 100 CAHs and 21,378 from 36 PPS hospitals. Outcome measures included six bivariate indicators of adverse events of surgical care that were developed from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Patient Safety Indicators. Multiple logistic regression models were developed to examine the relationship between hospital adverse events and CAH status. The results indicated that compared to PPS hospitals, CAHs are less likely to have any observed (unadjusted) adverse event on all six indicators, four of which are statistically significant. After adjusting for patient mix and hospital characteristics, CAHs perform better on three of the six indicators. Accounting for the number of discharges eliminated the differences between CAHs and PPS hospitals in the likelihood of adverse events across all indicators except one. Tele-emergency (tele-ED) services can address several challenges facing emergency departments (EDs) in rural areas. The second study investigates access and characterizes the impact of a rural-ED-based telemedicine program on discharge disposition in terms of patient transfer, local hospital admission, and routine discharge. This study tests the hypothesis that telemedicine enhances access by allowing patients to receive care in the local community, and does so by looking at the probability of transfer and local admissions before and after telemedicine was implemented in CAHs. The results indicate that in the post-telemedicine period, patients were 38% less likely to be admitted to the local inpatient facility than to be routinely discharged [aOR=0.62, 95%CI=(0.57,0.67)] after adjusting for age, sex, race, time of visit, clinical diagnosis, CPT code, number of diagnoses, and admitting hospital. The third study addresses cost and efficiency by modeling the financial implications of using the same telemedicine program to avoid transfers and estimating the costs and benefits associated with tele-ED implementation

[发布机构] University of Iowa