![]() ![]() These ERRs are currently used to assess care quality and determine hospital payments. It’s a little bit like issuing a final grade based on a few homework assignments and not a full semester’s worth of work.”Ĭalculations known as excess readmission ratios (ERRs) examine hospitals’ readmissions for heart failure, heart attack and pneumonia among Medicare beneficiaries. “Significant attention has been given to hospitals’ overall performance as determined by the public reporting of a small number of specific conditions and patient populations. Yeh, MD, MSc, Director of the Smith Center for Outcomes Research in Cardiology at BIDMC. “As it currently exists, the Medicare public reporting system offers an incomplete picture,” says senior author Robert W. Led by researchers at the Smith Center for Outcomes Research in Cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and publishing online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the study found significant differences in hospitals’ performance when readmissions were assessed for non-Medicare patients and for conditions other than those currently reported, showing that when these additional factors are taken into account, half of hospitals would be subject to a change in their financial penalty status. Now new research finds that these condition-specific readmissions measures may not accurately or fairly reflect hospital quality. Higher-than-average 30-day readmission rates not only result in poor report cards for low-performing hospitals, but can also result in substantial financial penalties. Among the most prominent of these are 30-day hospital readmission rates for specific conditions, including heart failure (HF), pneumonia and myocardial infarction (MI or heart attack) which are risk-adjusted to account for differences in patients’ health status. ![]() Hospital readmission rates in particular have gained substantial attention from policymakers and health care providers because of their high frequency and significant costs. Over the past several years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have reported hospital quality measures on the Hospital Compare website, providing the public with a way to compare hospital performance. ![]()
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