Faster Rehab May Have Drawbacks-NMR

[Guest guest]

Study: Faster Rehab May Have Drawbacks

Rehabilitation Patients Are Recovering Faster, But May Have Problems

Later

POSTED: 12:04 pm EDT October 12, 2004

UPDATED: 4:24 pm EDT October 12, 2004

A new study featured in this week's Journal of American Medical

Association http://www.jama.com> has mixed findings about the way

patients receive medical rehabilitation in this country.The good news is

that inpatient rehabilitation is taking less time than it used to get

good results, meaning patients can go home sooner. The bad news is that

more of those patients wind up returning to the hospital, or dying,

after being discharged. The patients in the study needed medical

rehabilitation because they suffered from conditions including stroke,

spinal cord injury, neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis,

or orthopedic conditions such as hip or knee replacements.

Dr. Carl Granger and his colleagues at the State University of New York

at Buffalo, and researchers at the University of Texas, conducted the

study that found most people in inpatient medical rehabilitation do get

better, and in less time than in years past. The average stay went from

20 days in 1994 to 12 days in 2001, and the patient progress stayed the

same. " The major findings include more efficiency in delivery of

rehabilitation services so that patients improve faster, which then

reduces the length of stay and also reduces the expense, " Granger

said.But the researchers, who studied nearly 150,000 medical

rehabilitation patients from 48 states, found a disturbing trend as

well: More patients died after discharge and more patients had to return

to the hospital after discharge. The percentage of patients who died

within six months after discharge increased from less than 1 percent to

almost 5 percent.The researchers don't yet know why those percentages

increased. Granger wonders how much the length of stay in rehab can be

reduced without impacting the patient's welfare.