Conference Coverage
Early tube feeding may speed discharge for elderly hip fracture patients
Major finding: Hospital length of stay for patients receiving enteral nutrition within 24 hours of hip surgery was 4.43 days vs 7.80 days for...
The mixed-physician group could be seen as a proxy for discontinuity of care among the attending physicians, they noted. Prior studies have found that such discontinuity was associated with longer hospital stays.
"There may be a lack of care coordination during patient hand offs between attending physicians that begins a cascade of events, ending with the insertion of a PEG feeding tube."
Dr. Diane E. Meier, professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, agreed that group care without a leader creates confusion. "One of the hallmarks of modern medicine in the U.S. is fragmentation. It is typical for a person with dementia to have a different specialist for every organ system, a problem compounded in the hospital when a completely new group of specialists is brought into the care team. The problem with this abundance of doctors is that no one is really in charge of the whole patient and what makes the most sense for the patient as a person. Organ- and specialty-specific decision making leads to bad practices – including trying to ‘solve’ a feeding difficulty as if it is an isolated problem when the real issue is progressive brain failure – a terminal illness that cannot be fixed with a feeding tube."
The study not only questions the feeding tube issue, but also the wisdom of repeatedly hospitalizing elderly patients with severe dementia who could be in the last phase of life – especially for conditions that are expected complications of severe dementia. The authors suggested that there may be financial motives to admit fee-for-service patients.
"The fee-for-service system provides incentives to hospitalize nursing home residents with severe dementia because such hospitalizations qualify the patients for skilled nursing home services. Bundling of payments and institutional special needs plans that reverse these financial incentives may reduce health care expenditures and improve the quality of care for nursing home residents with advanced dementia by avoiding burdensome transitions between facilities and the stress of relocation."
The National Institute on Aging funded the study. Dr. Teno made no financial declarations.