After the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program was enacted, readmission rates have dropped in the poorest-performing hospitals, reports an analysis published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
Hospital readmissions can't always be avoided but there is evidence that readmission rates widely vary, pointing to certain hospitals likely to readmit patients compared with others. Under the Affordable Care Act, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program was signed into law six years ago in response to the high rate of patients readmitted only within a month of their initial discharge after being treated for common conditions like acute myocardial infarction and heart failure.
The program was implemented in 2012.
Analyzing Hospital Readmission Rates
A team led by researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center analyzed data on Medicare fee-for-service hospitalizations from over 2,800 hospitals across the United States from 2000 to 2013, evaluating whether the implementation of the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program was effective in improving 30-day risk-standardized readmission rates.
For the analysis, hospitals were grouped into four: highest performance, average performance, low performance and lowest performance. These groupings were based on penalties incurred under the program.
According to the researchers' findings, all groups registered improvements to a certain degree but the highest level of reduction in readmission rates were observed in the lowest performers before the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program was put in place. This suggests that financial penalties can be a motivator for a health care provider to improve performance.
Patients Treated By Female Doctors Have Lower Readmission Rates
In another study, a Harvard-led team examined data from more than a million Medicare plan holders at least 65 years old and found that 5 percent of elderly patients who received treatment from female doctors were less likely to be readmitted within 30 days of their initial discharge, while 4 percent were less likely to die within 30 days of being admitted to the hospital.
According to Yusuke Tsugawa and colleagues, if male doctors were able to achieve the same, annual deaths in Medicare patients could drop by 32,000. That's a number comparable to vehicular accident deaths recorded in the United States every year!
The researchers said it's important to understand how female doctors are able to influence lower readmission and mortality rates as this can help guarantee best possible outcomes for patients regardless of their condition.
Currently, about a third of the physician population in the United States are female.
