Brown University Confirms Observation Continues to Replace Hospital Admission Status

Since 2008, the Center for Medicare Advocacy (the Center) has been reporting that an increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries are being placed in acute care hospital beds for multiple days – receiving medical and nursing care, diagnostic tests, treatments, medications, and food – but are being called “outpatients” in observation status, rather than admitted “inpatients.”  The chief adverse result of observation classification for beneficiaries is that Medicare does not cover beneficiaries’ subsequent skilled nursing facility care on the grounds that they failed to have a qualifying three-day inpatient hospital stay, as required by the Medicare statute.  Read more