Aspect of a single integrated overall health technique in Northern California (and incorporated only 1 IRF), our findings might not be generalizable to PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21186103 a broader range of post acute care facilities. The amount of therapy inside the IRF beneath study may have been greater than is out there in other IRFs as Medicare only requires five days of therapy as an alternative to the six received by the patients within this cohort.29 We weren’t able to manage for the content or high-quality of therapy, despite the fact that Kaiser has suggestions and very standardized approaches for the care of patients with strokes. Mainly because of our sample size, we collapsed all probable care trajectories into four separate groups. We chose to consist of those individuals who had received both IRF and SNF care (n=9) within the IRF group. Offered our hypothesis, that IRF care is much better than SNF care, we felt that such as these men and women in the IRF group was a far more conservative approach. Furthermore, the outcomes of our sensitivity evaluation examining the influence of those individuals whose trajectory integrated each SNF and IRF didn’t modify our overall conclusions. We only examined patients with stroke. Whilst stroke might be one of many additional popular diagnoses requiring post-acute care, our results might not be applicable to other popular situations requiring rehabilitation like hip and knee replacements. We had a 16 loss to adhere to up in our cohort and this could have affected our results. Even so, practically half with the loss to adhere to up was attributable to deaths in the cohort, a known post-stroke occasion. These deaths were equally distributed across groups, as were general withdrawals. In our statistical examination in the loss to follow up group, we discovered no variations involving those that withdrew and these inside the analytic group using the exception of age, suggesting that differential loss to follow-up didn’t substantively influence our outcomes. Ultimately, since the individuals in this cohort study were not randomized to groups, unmeasured variation among subjects may possibly account for some of the variations in functional scores at 6 months. Certainly, the explanatory energy of our models, even though higher than that reported by others,11 nonetheless indicates a sizable level of unexplained variance. When baseline functional status, patient demographics, and, to a lesser extent, post acute care website are important predictors, we weren’t capable to assess crucial patho-physiological variables including size and place of brain lesion that are specific to drive stroke outcomes.NIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptArch Phys Med Rehabil. Author manuscript; obtainable in PMC 2014 April 01.Chan et al.PageOur findings have two substantial policy implications. The fact that patients having a stroke may make much more gains in an IRF than in other post-acute care settings is essential due to the fact we might be on the cusp of key modifications in access to post-acute care. The field of well being care financing has been get 2-(Pyridyldithio)ethylamine (hydrochloride) moving toward bundled payments for many years.30 The movement to bundle payments was accelerated with all the passage of PPACA in 2010 which produced “Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs),” vertically integrated entities that happen to be accountable for the whole episode care from the individuals they manage. With bundling, there might be financial incentives for ACOs and other individuals to provide stroke care in SNFs or with HH/OP therapy given that they are less high priced selections than IRFs. Our data suggests that this may possibly come at a expense, as individuals in our cohort who received c.