A community-wide effort to reduce hospital utilization by patients requiring nursing home placement.

Described is an effort by health care providers to reduce hospital utilization by increasing admissions to skilled nursing facilities from hospitals. For a 6-month period, there were increased admissions from hospitals to nursing homes and a reduced number of hospital nonacute patients who required long-term care placement. Eventually, however, the nursing homes shifted their admission patterns to accept more persons from non-hospital settings. As a result, admissions from hospitals declined and the number of nonacute patients in hospitals increased.