The relationship of age and comorbid conditions to hospital and nursing home days in Medicaid recipients with HIV.

OBJECTIVE:To determine how aging impacts health care utilization in persons with HIV (PWH) compared to persons without HIV (PWoH). DESIGN:Matched case-control study. METHODS:We studied Medicaid recipients in the United States, aged 18-64 years, from 2001 to 2012. We matched each of 270,074 PWH to three PWoH by baseline year, age, gender, and zip code. Outcomes were hospital and nursing home days per month (DPM). Comorbid condition groups were cardiovascular disease, diabetes, liver disease, mental health conditions, pulmonary disease, and renal disease. We used linear regression to examine the joint relationships of age and comorbid conditions on the two outcomes, stratified by sex at birth. RESULTS:We found small excesses in hospital DPM for PWH compared with PWoH. There were 0.03 and 0.07 extra hospital DPM for females and males, respectively, and no increases with age. In contrast, excess nursing home DPM for PWH compared with PWoH rose linearly with age, peaking at 0.35 extra days for females and 0.4 extra days for males. HIV-associated excess nursing home DPM were greatest for persons with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental health conditions, and renal disease. For PWH at age 55, this represents an 81% increase in the nursing home DPM for males, and a 110% increase for females, compared PWoH. CONCLUSIONS:Efforts to understand and interrupt this pronounced excess pattern of nursing home DPM among PWH compared to PWoH are needed and may new insights into how HIV and comorbid conditions jointly impact aging with HIV.