ArticleHealth affairs scholar2025
Trends in hospital discharge outcomes among high-risk Medicare beneficiaries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Health affairs scholar, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Mortality and transitions-of-care after COVID-19 hospitalization among US Medicare patients: a retrospective claims analysis.BMC geriatrics · 2026Observational
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: Medicare beneficiaries face significant health risks and care disruptions during public health emergencies, but little is known about how care patterns evolved throughout the COVID-19 pandemic or differed between traditional Medicare (TM) and Medicare Advantage (MA). Methods: Using Medicare claims data for over 20 million hospital discharges during 2018-2022, we examined trends in hospital length of stay, discharge disposition, and mortality among beneficiaries with 5 major comorbidities (dementia, diabetes, congestive heart failure, hip fracture, and stroke), stratified by COVID status and payer type. Results: We found that COVID patients initially experienced substantially longer hospital stays (8.3 vs 4.6 days) and higher 30-day mortality (34% vs 5%) compared to patients without COVID. MA beneficiaries showed consistently higher home health utilization but similar mortality patterns to TM enrollees. By mid-2022, most outcome differences had converged between COVID and non-COVID patients, suggesting health system adaptation to the pandemic. Conclusion: Our findings highlight how the pandemic was associated with shifts toward home-based post-acute care, emphasizing the need for policies supporting home-based care infrastructure and flexible care delivery models that could help health systems better adapt during future public health emergencies.
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