Home health care visits that are longer by just one minute may be tied to lower hospital readmission rates. That’s the key finding from a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
“We obviously see an effect,” Guy David, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and author of the research, told Home Health Care News. “Shorter visits tend to increase the likelihood of readmissions.”
However, that doesn’t mean home health care providers should immediately start mandating longer visits.
Length of visit
The study looked at data from an unnamed private, for-profit, multi-state home health care company with 96 offices in 16 states. The data spanned three years and eight months: January 2012 to August 2015.
“An extra minute relative to the average length of a patient’s home health visits reduces their readmission likelihood by approximately 8%,” the study found.
The results were opposite than what researchers expected to find, according to David, who anticipated that longer visits would indicate higher patient acuity and a greater likelihood of heading back to the hospital.
“One [thought] is that longer visits [are] associated with more readmissions—with sicker patients who require more attention and are [therefore] likely to be readmitted,” he said. “It’s interesting that we are seeing the opposite. The causal relationship runs in the other direction.”
The relationship between length of visit and readmission rates is a little more nuanced, though.