By Michelle McCleerey – The Journal of the AMA recently published a study which revealed that more than one in four hospital readmissions are potentially preventable. The underlying issue behind many of the key factors contributing to preventative readmissions? A lack of care team communication and collaboration.
Read More
By Ashish Jha – Because hospitals are expensive and often cause harm, there has been a big focus on reducing hospital use. This focus has been the underpinning for numerous policy interventions, most notable of which is the Affordable Care Act’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program.
CMS proposed to revise the discharge planning requirements that hospitals, including long-term care hospitals and inpatient rehabilitation facilities, critical access hospitals, and home health agencies, must meet in order to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The Joint Commission has developed two new resources to help health care providers in their efforts to reduce patient readmissions and improve the discharge process. The resources are a new Speak Up campaign for providers and organizations to educate patients.
By Claudia Steiner MD, MPH – If you hear health services researchers talking about a “nerd,” you shouldn’t necessarily assume they’re talking about themselves. For now, they’re probably referring to a new database. The database in question—the Nationwide Readmissions Database or NRD (hence the nickname, “nerd”)—is the newest addition to AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project.
By Elizabeth H. Bradley, Amanda Brewster & Leslie Curry – Many people, particularly older patients, are readmitted soon after being discharged from the hospital. These unexpected return visits are expensive and challenging for patients and their families, and costly for Medicare. Nearly 20 percent of Medicare beneficiaries experience an unplanned hospital readmission, with an estimated cost to the American public of about $26 billion per year.
By Phil McNulty – Care teams within skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) know intimately how readmissions affect the patients they care for, with risks including challenging their already fragile condition while potentially increasing the potential of infection, polypharmacy, and discomfort and stress for the resident and family.
Memorial Hospital, a 97-bed community hospital in Marysville, Ohio, uses strategies from AHRQ’s Re-Engineered Discharge (RED) toolkit to help newly discharged patients follow their treatment plans and improve their health in order to avoid readmission to the hospital.
By Sarianne Gruber – Predicting Readmission Risk with Institution Specific Prediction Models is a study that illustrates why healthcare analytics has a vital role in meeting challenges of new policies, managing population health, and predicting a patient’s risk to readmit.