The Center for Community Support and Research (CCSR) at Wichita State has been contracted by the Kansas Department on Aging (KDOA) to provide an evaluation of provisionally discharged Medicaid recipients released from Kansas hospitals into nursing facilities.

Over the past several years an increasing amount of nursing facility care has been in the form of short-term or rehabilitation services. These services are provided to individuals needing care, but have no intention or need for long-term nursing facility care.

The evaluation will examine the relationship between individual characteristics (diagnosis, patient age, location, therapeutic progress rate, caregiver availability, etc.) and their length of stay in nursing home facilities once discharged from a Kansas hospital.

CCSR Director Scott Wituk said the evaluation could impact other state and/or federal policies in the future.

“When a hospital discharges an individual to a nursing facility for long-term care, federal requirements mandate that a person cannot reside in a Medicaid-certified nursing facility for a period of more than 30 days without complying with the Preadmission Screening and Resident Review (PASRR) process,” Wituk said. “The current PASRR process has started to show its limitations as more individuals are in nursing facility care for less than 30 days or between 30 to 60 days. Implementing the PASRR process is costly and potentially unnecessary in some situations. Our goal is to better understand which situations that might be.”

CCSR Research and Evaluation team members who will work on the project include Tara Gregory, Hannah Lann Wolcott, Lynn Schrepferman and Oli Dziadkowiec.

“We look forward to working with KDOA,” Wituk said. “They have been great partners to date, and hope we can continue this relationship into the future.”

For more information, contact Wituk at (316) 978-3327.