Using Medicare Cost Reports to Calculate Costs for Post-acute Care Claims

Book excerpt: In this paper, we describe technical approaches for calculating costs associated with Medicare post-acute care provider claims, including long-term care hospitals (LTCHs), inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs), home health agencies (HHAs), and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), using Medicare cost report data (Healthcare Cost Report Information System, or HCRIS) and claims data. Analyses of resource utilization often focus on costs of providing medical care, rather than payments for medical care. Calculated costs more accurately reflect the claim-level costs to providers of providing care than the payments made to providers, which often include policy adjustments (such as disproportionate share payments for inpatient hospitals) that are not directly related to the costs of providing care.