Rehabilitation overtakes childbirth as most common hospital stay for Medibank customers

Rehabilitation treatment has overtaken childbirth as the most common reason for a hospital stay for Medibank customers.

Rehabilitation treatment has for the first time overtaken childbirth as the most common reason for an overnight hospital stay among insurance giant Medibank’s customers.

The company’s new “health cost and utilisation” report showed that overnight rehabilitation admissions had grown by more than 20 per cent since 2013. The average benefit Medibank paid on behalf of its customers last year for that service was $10,250, an increase of about $1000 in the past five years.

Medibank’s group executive of healthcare and strategy, Andrew Wilson, said the trend was fuelled by the availability of joint replacements and other orthopedic procedures — which accounted for the majority of rehabilitation — for people who in the past may not have had such procedures done.

The Medibank report revealed that the number of people treated in hospital overnight for rehabilitation had increased from 14,579 in 2013 to 17,759 last year, while for childbirth that figure had decreased from 22,523 in 2013 to 17,562 four years later.

Dr Wilson said the data highlighted that there was more in-hospital rehabilitation being done than needed to be. “Rehabilitation in the home, which delivers equivalent outcomes and allows consumers more choice about where they receive their care, needs to be deployed far more frequently,” he said.

Dr Wilson argued that for healthcare to be affordable, more care had to be delivered in the home. “If we don’t do that, (health insurance) premiums will keep rising at rates that consumers feel are unsustainable,” he said.

The issue of affordable health insurance is shaping as a key topic of debate at the next federal election after Bill Shorten promised if elected to cap annual premium increases at 2 per cent for the first two years of a Labor government.

Dr Wilson added that there was a lot more home-based care provided through the public ­system than the private sector.

The Medibank executive argued that the private sector needed to ­develop more maturity in its ­out-­of-hospital care systems. “This needs to involve not just insurers but providers. Everyone has to get on the program here and start to look at how we create more scalability with these (in-home) programs because otherwise consumers will continue to vote with their feet on affordability,” he said.

 

The Medibank report also found that same-day hospital rehabilitation admissions had increased by 40 per cent since 2013.

Australian public and private hospitals refer patients to in-­hospital rehabilitation at rates ranging widely from 3 per cent to more than 60 per cent. In Canada, the US and Britain, rates for in-hospital rehabilitation were between 10 and 20 per cent.

The health cost and utilisation report for the financial year ending June last year also showed a continuing upward trend in the cost of health services.

The data revealed that the most expensive benefit paid on behalf of a Medibank customer for the financial year was $574,710 on a single in-hospital claim. That claim was for a heart-­related procedure.

Of the top 10 most expensive hospital claims for fiscal 2017, two were for heart-related conditions and three for neonatal admissions. The single highest in-hospital neonatal claim was $445,000.