Hospitals bring more I. T. to bear while looking for the
underlying reasons why patients come back.
ROOTING OUT
RE A DMIS SIONS
By Greg Gillespie
This is the year readmissions got real. The Centers for Medi- care and Medicaid Services launched its Readmission
Reduction Program in October, and few
hospitals made it through unscathed.
The program and the readmissions pen-
alties it metes out were authorized under
the Affordable Care Act. In this first year of
launch, the reduction program penalized
hospitals up to 1 percent of their regular
Medicare reimbursements for having high
rates of 30-day readmissions (calculated via
an “excess readmission ratio”) for heart at-
tack, heart failure and pneumonia.
2015. On top of that, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,
which oversees CMS, has the discretion to
add additional readmission categories to
the mix. It’s expected that readmission rates
for cardiac bypass surgery, cardiac stenting
and other vascular procedures will be under
the microscope.
To say that readmissions have hospitals’
attention is an understatement. But for all
that attention, and the subsequent I. T. expenditures and program launches, readmission
rates for heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia are barely budging: data published
