Study puts Medicare’s three-day inpatient hospital stay in focus

(By – Adam Smeltz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Medicine has changed a lot since the 1960s, but Medicare still has in place a policy created in 1965 that requires that patients spend three days as an inpatient before they can be moved to a skilled nursing facility. “The concern is that the policy may be unnecessarily extending the length of hospital stays. We know that every day in a hospital carries some risk, whether it’s for an infection, blood clots or some other risk,” said health policy researcher Amal N. Trivedi, whose study appears this week in the journal Health Affairs. Read more…

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