A hospital’s readmission rates may be tied to a range of quality issues, in addition to the health status of the patient population, according to a recent study.
Almost one in five patients is readmitted within 30 days, according to the (CMS, which tracks readmissions for certain conditions, including heart failure, pneumonia, and most recently, a disease of the lungs.
A team of researchers from Yale University in New Haven, CT, analyzed data from more than 3,700 hospitals, comparing COPD readmissions to several quality measures, ranging from mortality rates to patient care experiences such as communication with nurses, staff responsiveness, pain management, and discharge information. (An abstract of the study is available online at: http://bit.ly/2ov3ewd.)
They found that readmissions for COPD correlate with readmissions for other diseases, suggesting that high readmissions rates may be due to the health status of the patient population affected by COPD. They also noted an association between COPD readmission rates and patient experiences.
“These findings suggest there may be common organizational factors that influence multiple disease-specific outcomes,” the researchers concluded. “As pay-for-performance programs focus attention on individual disease outcomes, hospitals may benefit from in-depth assessments of organizational factors affecting multiple aspects of hospital quality.”
