Physicians are making a real dent in hospital readmissions, improving bounce-back rates by 8% during 2011 and 2012, according to preliminary government data.
The rate of 30-day all-cause readmissions in the Medicare fee for service program was 17.5% in 2013, down from 18.5% in 2012. National rates had been stuck around 19.5% during the 5 previous years.
The preliminary data, which were released on May 7, were compiled by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Dr. Patrick Conway
Federal officials credited the Affordable Care Act with providing the tools hospitals needed to make the improvements, including one provision that ties hospital payments to reductions in readmission rates. The Medicare Readmissions Reduction Program, which launched in 2012, imposes payment penalties on hospitals with high readmission rates. Starting in October, the penalty will rise to 3% and will be based on readmissions for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and hip/knee arthroplasty.
Injuries and deaths from adverse drug events, falls, and infections are also declining, according to the new data. Nationally, hospital-acquired conditions decreased 9% between 2010 and 2012. The safety gains translated into nearly 15,000 fewer deaths in hospitals and $3.2 billion in decreased costs to the health care system in 2012 alone, according to HHS.
Dr. Patrick Conway, the chief medical officer and director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, gave a preview of the data in March at the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He credited hospitalists for their role in achieving the "dramatic progress."
"You are improving so fast on quality process of care measures for CMS that we actually have to pull them out of the program," Dr. Conway told the audience of hospitalists. "We’ve removed almost half of the measures that were in hospital value-based purchasing in the inpatient quality reporting program over the last 3 years and that’s because the performance has increased so much."
mschneider@frontlinemedcom.com
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