Implications of the Adult Day Health Care Evaluation Study for program revision and research

With no additional effort to revise adult day health care (ADHC) services or the types of patients who receive them, it would appear that adding an ADHC program to a VA Medical Center would not achieve the desired objectives. The authors discuss here the advantages, disadvantages, and feasibility of 2 options for program revision. The first is to target ADHC to those types of patients who may be most likely to benefit. A targeting scheme should use the most objective criteria possible and may need to be implemented as part of a case-managed package of community-based services. The second option for program revision is to reduce the costs of ADHC services. A cost model developed as a part of the study demonstrated the effect of possible revisions, including increasing enrollment, reducing staffing costs, decreasing length of stay in ADHC, and increasing substitution of ADHC for other services. These changes differ in the level of administrative support and clinician behavior change needed for their implementation. This report then concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for implementation of VA-ADHC versus contract ADHC, and a discussion of possible directions for future research.