The following are stories on readmissions published in the last month, with the most recent stories first.
1. More Dually Eligible Patients? More Readmissions Penalties: Hospitals with higher numbers of patients who simultaneously qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid have worse readmissions rates and are therefore more likely to be penalized for readmissions.
2. New Data on Hospital Readmission Reduction Strategies: Researchers looked at a sample of hospitals participating in the American College of Cardiology and Institute for Healthcare Improvement's Hospital to Home Quality Improvement Initiative to find changes in the adoption of various readmissions reduction strategies over time.
3. 364 Hospitals Have Above-Average Medicare Readmission Rates, New Data Shows: New Medicare data shows about 8 percent of hospitals, including some of the most prominent hospitals in the country, have overall readmission rates that exceed the national average.
4. When Readmissions Programs Fail, What's Next?: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care has forced hospitals to seriously reassess readmissions. Programs specific to preventing readmissions for heart failure, heart attacks and pneumonia are now commonplace in hospitals across the country. However, these programs, while effective at the very start, often begin to plateau, leaving clinicians scrambling to redesign care-reinforcing readmissions programs at a time when penalties are increasing to their highest levels yet.
5. Comorbidities Most Common Cause of Readmissions: A recent study found that of the five most common diagnoses that cause hospital readmissions, most are potential complications of chronic conditions.
6. Study Identifies Interventions to Limit Pediatric Readmissions: Using a systematic review process, researchers identified a handful of common factors in pediatric readmission discharge interventions for certain conditions.
7. Reducing Hospital Readmissions Rates: How to Avoid Upcoming Penalties and Maintain Patient Wellness: With nearly one in five Medicare patients returning to the hospital within a month of discharge, the government considers readmissions a leading symptom of a costly and uncoordinated health system. In order to address this problem, CMS created quality programs that reward healthcare providers and hospitals with incentive payments for using electronic health records in order to promote improved care quality and better care coordination. In the coming years, these incentive "carrots" will soon turn into penalty "sticks."
8. CMS Updates Hospital Compare With Hip, Knee Replacement Data: CMS has released data on readmissions and complications rates for hip and knee replacements, publishing lists of the "best" and "worst" hospitals for the surgeries.
9. 5 Latest Stories, Studies on Infection Control: The Healthcare Cost Utilization Project has been crunching the numbers on spending and healthcare use for the last decade. Several of the project's statistical briefs analyze the national cost of readmissions various conditions. Here are the per-patient costs of readmission for CMS-tracked conditions.
10. 18 Most-Read Quality Stories of 2013: Avoidable readmissions have declined significantly between 2012 and 2013, continuing the second year of declining readmissions, according to data from CMS. The agency posted all-cause 30-day readmission rates data between 2007 and August 2013.
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