The inclusion of socioeconomic data, such as poverty rate, educational attainment and housing vacancy rate, had a significant effect on 30-day hospital readmission rates for patients admitted with acute myocardial infarction, heart failure and pneumonia, according to a Health Affairs study.
Researchers compared results for hospitals in Missouri under two types of models — the first was the model currently being used by CMS for public reporting of condition-specific hospital readmission rates of Medicare patients and the second model was an "enriched" version of the first model with census tract-level socioeconomic data.
According to the study, the model including socioeconomic data narrowed the range of observed variation in 30-day readmission rates for:
• Acute myocardial infarction — from 6.5 percent to 1.8 percent
• Heart failure — from 14 percent to 7.4 percent
• Pneumonia — from 7.4 percent to 3.7 percent
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