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CAH Study Author Defends Surprising Data

 |  By John Commins  
   April 03, 2013

A contentious study out this week suggests that mortality rates in critical access hospitals are worsening.

The basics of the study are thus: Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health examined administrative data from nearly 10 million Medicare fee-for-service admissions for acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, and pneumonia between 2002–2010.

Comparing 30-day mortality rates of CAHs and non-CAHs in urban and rural settings, they found that while CAHs and non-CAHs had comparable mortality rates for the three conditions in 2002, CAHs gradually fell behind each year to the point where by 2010 CAHs mortality rates were 13.3% and non-CAH mortality rates were 11.4%, a difference of 1.8%.

In an interview, the study's lead author, Karen E. Joynt, MD, MPH, a cardiologist and an instructor at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, offered her interpretation of the findings:

HLM: Were you surprised by your findings?

KJ: "We were actually. We had done a paper two years ago in which we looked at critical access hospitals in a cross-sectional fashion, a one-time look at outcomes and resources at critical access hospitals. We received quite a bit of feedback on that work from rural providers.

Many of them said it is not fair to look at one point it time because we have improved over time. You should look longitudinally. We thought that was a fair request and we did, and to our surprise we found that critical access hospitals had been performing, at least on mortality, relatively equivalently to non-CAHs earlier in the decade, but that over the past 10 years we have seen a separation of outcomes."

HLM: Are you confident that your study makes an apples-to-apples comparison?

KJ: Everyone on in the study is a Medicare patient over the age of 65 and not in a Medicare HMO. I don't think there is any reason to think that the difference between rural and non-rural patients, or more relevantly rural patients that go to critical access hospitals versus rural patients that go to other rural hospitals, that the differences in their characteristics should have changed so much over time as to make these results appear from nowhere.

Certainly rural patients are different from urban patients, but in most research the people who do the best are suburbanites. I don't think this is driven by simply the fact that rural patients are so much sicker and so much older because we control for things like age and diabetes. We don't perfectly control for things like smoking or obesity because we can't measure those. But I don't think the changes over time have been so vast that that is what we are looking at here.

HLM: How significant is the 1.8% difference in mortality rates?  

KJ: What it is telling us is that we have left these hospitals behind because 1.8% of the absolute mortality rate is 1 in 50 people. That is more than 10% of the actual rate, so in clinical trial speak it is a significant relevant risk.

But what is important here is not the specific numbers, but recognizing that the effort to carve these hospitals into a separate program than the remainder of the hospitals in the country has not done them any favors and it hasn't done any favors for the people seeking care at these hospitals.

If you live in rural Maine or rural Nevada and you present to your local hospital having a heart attack in this day and age we should expect that a system of hospital care will figure out how to treat that patient as optimally as possible.

What this [research] points out to me is not so much a problem with the hospitals as it is a systems problem. It's not realistic to expect that these small hospitals should have the same resources as other hospitals do. Having a 24-hour cardiac cath lab in a hospital with 10 beds doesn't make any sense.

But if you live out there and you have a heart attack, we should have a system that gets you where you need to be. With telemedicine and other technologies it seems like as a system we could do better for rural patients.

It's not that these hospitals are doing a bad job. It's that we are asking them to do an impossible job if they are not supported. I am a cardiologist. I work in an academic medical center. The resources that I have at my disposal at an academic medical center are completely different from the resources that a physician has working at a critical access hospital. I cannot imagine how hard that job must be.

The doctors working at critical access hospitals are probably the hardest working doctors in medicine. [That means] being the only person in a hospital trying to take care of someone who with a hip fracture and someone who walks in with a heart attack and someone who walks in with heart failure or a stroke wherein today's era of medicine we are changing the guidelines for the treatments for these things on a few monthly basis.

This may be pointing out that with the advancements we have been able to make treating heart attacks and heart failure and to some degree pneumonia, these hospitals and rural patients are getting left behind. That seems like a fixable problem.

HLM: Do you believe the CAH Program has been a success or a failure?

KJ: There were two big components of the Critical Access Hospital Program. One was to give them cost-based reimbursements. The other was to exempt them from quality reporting. They are not included in value-based purchasing. They are not included in accountable care organizations. They are not included in public reporting.

Part of the program worked terrifically. The closures have dropped tremendously. There really are areas in which there would be no medical care if it weren't for this program. But leaving them on their own and saying 'good luck' has not been a good solution.

I understand that (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) was trying to relieve these hospitals of an administrative burden by not including them, but the consequence seems to be that no one knew these outcomes were not improving at many of these critical access hospitals in the way that we were seeing mortality from many inpatient conditions drop over the last decade.

That to me in this era of transparency and trying to build better systems and being more patient-centered doesn't make much sense as a long-term strategy.

Another issue is [that] there are plenty of critical access hospitals that are not rural or isolated. It is hard to understand the rationale if it is a medium-sized hospital in a suburb for why their under this different set of regulations.

At this point we should be thinking about systems and transparency and not leaving out rural communities. It feels wrong to me that we are OK with folks in rural areas having worse outcomes than folks in urban areas. We can do better than that.

HLM: Your study suggests that "new efforts" are needed to improve mortality rates at CAHs. What do you recommend?

KJ: Finances and the quality should be separate. Regardless of how the hospitals are financed if you are providing care to Medicare patients in this day and age… people deserve to understand data and to see what is happening at their local hospitals and exempting 1,000 hospitals from having to participate in quality monitoring is not a good long-term solution.

HLM: Do you believe that the reporting exemptions for CAHs should end?

KJ: I do. The burden of reporting can be lessened if that is the barrier. If the barrier is we need to have them electronically report because they don't have the infrastructure to be able to have a person doing the chart instruction, then let's find electronic records systems, which would help all small rural hospitals.

Saying they are too small to collect data is not realistic in this day and age. Something about the participation in these quality programs and reporting really does make a difference in what these hospitals are able to do. Small rural hospitals that aren't critical access hospitals still have to submit their quality data and have to function in the same roles as everybody else.

HLM: How do you address criticisms that your study relies on administrative data to measure clinical outcomes?

KJ: I agree there are limitations to administrative data, but it doesn't make it useless. Administrative data can show us a pattern and then we need clinical and qualitative data to understand why. The wrong response to this paper would be to say there is obviously no problem. This is all a trick of administrative data. That is a little biased.

The appropriate response is that it looks like there is a problem in that these hospitals appear to be falling further and further behind.

What we need to do now is to ask why and what can we do about it. If we determine that it's all because the patients are older and sicker then OK, let's figure out what we need to do to take care of older sicker rural people. And if we find out it's because patients are declining transfer to the big city hospital because they want to be close to home, OK then let's find telemedicine or tele-ICU or other consultations to bring the care to them so they can stay close to home.

It's not fake data. These are real people. They are dead. These are Medicare patients, someone's grandmother who died. It is true that administrative data will give you statistically significant results for very small differences because we have millions of people. That is a sample size issue.

But the differences, particularly for acute MI are clinically relevant. It is more than a third higher mortality over the last decade for heart attacks where the rest of the country has been improving care for heart attacks. That is not write-off-able.

Let's stop ignoring these hospitals and see if we can think creatively to help rural patients do better.

HLM: How should CAHs reforms be implemented?

KJ: We need to get the stakeholders from critical access hospitals at the table and hear from them what they need. I'm not the person who will come up with a solution. My guess is that critical access hospitals could lay out for us 'these are the barriers I face in trying to get my patients access to X,Y,Z care and these are the things that could make my job easier.' We should listen to the critical access hospitals and find out how federal and state policies can connect them better and enable them more and give them more resources.

I don't actually care about the hospitals so much. I care about the patients. If your grandmother lives in some rural place you want to know that there is some community institution close to home where she can go if she needs something and where they can make a decision about what is best for her, on whether or not the things she needs can be provided there, and that she can come back there to get whatever she needs when she is done in the big city.

The system as it is now is not very robust for rural patients.

John Commins is a content specialist and online news editor for HealthLeaders, a Simplify Compliance brand.

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