Healthy Days at home: A novel population-based outcome measure.

BACKGROUND

Healthy Days at Home (HDAH) is a novel population-based outcome measure developed in conjunction with the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

METHODS

We identified beneficiary age, sex, race, and Medicaid eligibility, death date, chronic conditions and healthcare utilization among a 20% sample of Medicare beneficiaries in 2016. For each beneficiary we calculated HDAH for the year by subtracting the following measure components from 365 days: mortality days, the total number of days spent in inpatient, observation, skilled nursing facilities (SNF), inpatient psychiatry, inpatient rehabilitation and long-term hospital settings as well as the number of outpatient emergency department and home health visits. We examined how HDAH and its components varied by beneficiary demographic characteristics and chronic condition burden as well as by healthcare market (Hospital Referral Region). We specified a patient-level linear regression adjustment model with HDAH as the outcome and incorporated market fixed effects as well as beneficiary age, sex, and Chronic Conditions Warehouse categories as covariates. We examined the impact of including home health visits in the measure, as well as the association between market demographics and health system characteristics and mean market HDAH. We examined how HDAH changed from 2013 to 2016.

RESULTS

The 6,637,568 beneficiaries age 65 and older in our sample had a mean of 347.2 HDAH, those 80 and older had a mean of 325.3 while those with three or more chronic conditions had a mean of 333.7. The components that led to the largest reduction in HDAH were mortality (7.4 days), home health (2.7 visits), SNF utilization (2.4 days) and inpatient care (1.5 days). The worst performing market had 5.8 fewer adjusted HDAH on average compared to the national mean, while beneficiaries in the best-performing market had 5.0 more HDAH on average compared to the national mean, among all beneficiaries age 65 and older.

CONCLUSIONS

HDAH is a population-based quality measure with substantial market-level variation.

IMPLICATIONS

HDAH recognizes the multidimensional nature of healthcare and may afford providers greater flexibility to tailor quality-improvement initiatives to the unique needs of their patients.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE

Level II.