After years of divesting skilled nursing facilities, hospitals are responding to the growing challenge of finding skilled nursing beds into which to discharge their patients by looking to get back into the skilled nursing business.
Sort of.
In general, acute-care hospitals are no longer interested in owning nursing homes but they are interested in securing access to the skilled nursing beds they need for their patients through bed reservation contracts, management and lease agreements, sharing their clinicians with nursing facilities, and more while also expanding their hospital at-home programs because they see their average length of stay increasing not because their patients are more acutely ill but because they lack sufficient post-acute-care options.
Learn more about what hospitals are doing to address the challenge they face finding post-acute-care placements for their patients from the McKnight’s Long-Term Care News article “Backlogged hospitals want back into the nursing home business — without the hassles of ownership.”