Because rehabilitation, but not the timing of rehabilitation, might accompany functional recovery in acute care hospitals, policy-makers should encourage a referral policy for rehabilitation-intensive facilities along with monitoring unnecessarily long hospitalizations.

To improve efficient care for recovering functional status among policy-makers under a restrictive fiscal policy and increasingly aged population in the 21st century, it should be determined whether rehabilitation, earlier initiation of rehabilitation, and longer hospitalization produce functional recovery in acute care hospitals.

Rehabilitation at a generalized unit produced greater functional recovery than no rehabilitation or rehabilitation at intensive care units. A longer hospitalization, but not a one-day delay of rehabilitation initiation, resulted in less recovery independently.

Says Dr. Ichiro Innami, a professor of Faculty of Policy Management, Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, "It is expected that the longer hospitalization without any intervention for maintaining/improving the functional status might cause the functional deterioration during the hospitalization, meaning it might produce the supplier-induced demand." Health policy makers should acknowledge the quantitative justification of reducing length of hospitalization as well as the value of rehabilitation in the rehabilitation-intensive institutions.

The future applicability of this study methodology in the degenerative musculoskeletal diseases or geriatric trauma will be promising and possible in the acute care hospitals. And another outcome of functional recovery should be reconsidered in the acute care settings, in addition to the resource use, complication and mortality in the pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research.

This will be discussed in Value in Health, the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and outcomes Research.

Value in Health publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research and help health care leaders to make decisions that are solidly evidence-based. The journal is published bi-monthly and has a regular readership of over 5,000 clinicians, decision-makers, and researchers worldwide.

Source:
ISPOR