The number of observation stays are growing in this country, in part as a response to Medicare audits that are disallowing admissions for some patients \u2013 and maybe in part to reduce crowding in the Emergency Medicine Department. The problem is that criteria are not clear, so there is likely a lot of variability across institutions. Also, there may be financial consequences for patients who incur a greater expense than if they were officially admitted.<\/p>\n
In many places there is no difference between a short admission and an observation stay. It is also challenging to defend the decisions because clear guidance from Medicare about who needs an admission (or who should have an observation stay) are not available (as far as I know). Here are two recent articles on this issue, from The Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em> and The Boston Globe<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n What is your experience? How are you deciding who should have an observation stay?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The number of observation stays are growing in this country, in part as a response to Medicare audits that are disallowing admissions for some patients \u2013 and maybe in part to reduce crowding in the Emergency Medicine Department. The problem is that criteria are not clear, so there is likely a lot of variability across […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1158,474,1157],"class_list":["post-27007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-hospital-admissions","tag-medicare","tag-observation-stays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}