Medicare To Penalize 2,211 Hospitals For Excess Readmissions
Five months before Medicare’s hospital readmission penalties take effect, two groups of authors say Congress and the government are taking the wrong approach.
Readmission rates have increasingly become a measure of a hospital’s quality of care. As part of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare is planning to tie payment to readmission statistics, even penalizing hospitals for readmissions deemed avoidable.
The number of older Americans hospitalized with heart failure declined 30 percent from 1998 to 2008, saving the U.S. health insurance program for the elderly $4.1 billion annually
How do hospitals ensure a discharge doesn’t result in an avoidable readmission? What is most important is communication.
The list names 292 hospitals whose 30-day readmission rates were the highest in the nation in at least one of three disease categories, acute myocardial infarction, pneumonia and congestive heart failure over three years.
Although readmissions after hospital discharge are often taken as evidence of substandard care, most of those reviewed in a multicenter study were judged to have been unavoidable.
Medicare Prepares Rule To Penalize Hospitals With High Readmission Rates
Transitional care interventions can prevent readmissions for congestive heart failure patients and save healthcare costs overall by keeping people healthier. But they’re money losers
Five of Florida’s major public and non-profit hospitals scored so poorly on return rates for Medicare patients that they will get preference this summer in a grant program to fix the problem
What Essentia is doing with disease management and its telemedicine scaling program has attracted the attention of the Healthcare Innovations Exchange, part of the AHRQ
HHS should include patient characteristics such as race and limited English proficiency in its risk-adjustment methodology as it implements the hospital re-admissions-reduction program
With looming cuts to Medicare payments for preventable readmissions, hospitals are stepping up efforts to improve discharge planning and follow-up once patients go home
The animated character on a computer screen, who explains medical instructions, is one of several new strategies hospitals are using to help patients make the transition to home,
Patients undergoing hip-replacement surgery are being released earlier, while more make return trips to the hospital within 30 days of the procedure
The administration plans to hand out $500 million in grants to community-based organizations that partner with hospitals to develop programs targeting patients immediately after they are discharged.
Readmission Reduction Strategies Pay Off
Virtual Discharge Assistant Cuts Re-admissions, Costs
Hospitals could see their Medicare payments reduced by up to 1 percent beginning in October 2012, 2 percent the following year and 3 percent the next.
A Hospital Prevents Re-admissions, but Threatens Revenue
There’s a physician in Los Angeles who wants to give you $3 million. All you have to do is design an elegant math model that accurately identifies which of 100,000 Medicare Advantage patients from an actual 2009 database required an unplanned hospital admission in 2010.
Vita Advisors, LLC is a research-based strategic advisory firm serving the health care industry.
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