Changes in Long-Term Care Markets: Assisted Living Supply and the Prevalence of Low-Care Residents in Nursing Homes.

Cornell PY, Zhang W, Thomas KS. Changes in Long-Term Care Markets: Assisted Living Supply and the Prevalence of Low-Care Residents in Nursing Homes. Journal of The American Medical Directors Association. 2020 Aug 1; 21(8):1161-1165.e4.

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Abstract:

OBJECTIVES: To assess the effect of changes in assisted living (AL) capacity within a market on prevalence of residents with low care needs in nursing homes. DESIGN: Retrospective, longitudinal analysis of nursing home markets. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Twelve thousand two hundred fifity-one nursing homes in operation during 2007 and 2014. MEASUREMENTS: We analyzed the percentage of residents in a nursing home who qualified as low-care. For each nursing home, we constructed a market consisting of AL communities, Medicare beneficiaries, and competing nursing homes within a 15-mile radius. We estimated the effect of change in AL beds on prevalence of low-care residents using multivariate linear models with year and nursing home fixed effects. RESULTS: The supply of AL beds increased by an average 258 beds per nursing home market (standard deviation  =  591) during the study period. The prevalence of low-care residents decreased from an average of 13.0% (median 10.5%) to 12.2% (median 9.5%). In adjusted models, a 100-bed increase in AL supply was associated with a decrease in low-care residents of 0.041 percentage points (P  =  .026), controlling for changes in market and nursing home characteristics, county demographics, and year and nursing home fixed effects. In markets with a high percentage of its Medicare beneficiaries ( = 14%) dual eligible for Medicaid, the effect of AL is stronger, with a 0.066-percentage point decrease per 100 AL beds (P  =  .026) vs a 0.016-percentage point decrease in low-duals markets (P  =  .48). CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Our analysis suggests that some of the growth in AL capacity serves as a substitute for nursing homes for patients with low care needs. Furthermore, the effects are concentrated in markets with an above-average proportion of beneficiaries with dual Medicaid eligibility.