Characteristics of cost outliers who did not benefit from stroke rehabilitation

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to identify stroke patients who generated substantial charges during inpatient rehabilitation, but did not seem to benefit from that experience and 2) to identify factors that can predict which patients will fall into this group using only variables known at admission to rehabilitation. High cost stroke patients during inpatient medical rehabilitation are examined to determine how they differ from low cost patients and to identify a subset who did not appear to benefit from rehabilitation. This paper is based on longitudinal charge data involving 73 former stroke rehabilitation patients discharged from three Boston area rehabilitation facilities in 1984. Medical charges are presented on initial acute and rehabilitation inpatient stays and on care received in the 12 months after discharge. Among these 73 stroke patients, charges for inpatient medical rehabilitation amounted to nearly 1.8 million dollars, excluding physician fees and out-of-pocket expenses. Of this total, 57.6% was accured by only 33% of the patients. Fourteen patients, who were both rehabilitation cost outliers and apparent rehabilitation "failures," were identified. Rehabilitation charges for these 14 amounted to $673,232 or 37.5% of the total rehabilitation charges for all 73 patients.