Despite the potential penalties of the Value-Based Purchasing Program, recent data has shown little improvement in hospitals' readmission rates, according to a Kaiser Health News report.
The most recent data pertains to readmission rates from July 2008 though the end of June 2011. The rate of readmission for heart attack patients within 30 days of discharge decreased by 0.1 percent — accounting for 19.7 percent of heart attack patients — compared with the 2007 through 2010 rate. There was also a 0.1 percent decrease for the rate of heart failure readmissions (24.7 percent), while readmission for pneumonia rose by 0.1 percent (18.5 percent).
American Hospital Association Vice President Nancy Foster said the new data minimizes improvements made in 2011, as those changes may have been outweighed by the two years prior.
Ashish Jha, MD, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said considerable policy effort has been put into value-based purchasing, yet there is no improvement. "Either we have no idea how to really improve readmissions, or most of the readmissions are not preventable and the efforts being put on it are not useful," he said in the report.
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The most recent data pertains to readmission rates from July 2008 though the end of June 2011. The rate of readmission for heart attack patients within 30 days of discharge decreased by 0.1 percent — accounting for 19.7 percent of heart attack patients — compared with the 2007 through 2010 rate. There was also a 0.1 percent decrease for the rate of heart failure readmissions (24.7 percent), while readmission for pneumonia rose by 0.1 percent (18.5 percent).
American Hospital Association Vice President Nancy Foster said the new data minimizes improvements made in 2011, as those changes may have been outweighed by the two years prior.
Ashish Jha, MD, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said considerable policy effort has been put into value-based purchasing, yet there is no improvement. "Either we have no idea how to really improve readmissions, or most of the readmissions are not preventable and the efforts being put on it are not useful," he said in the report.
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