The general hospital readmission rate is one way to evaluate the performance of a health care facility. One study looked into how effective the Hospital Readmission Reduction is.
The findings revealed that after the law imposing penalties on hospitals with the highest readmission rates, there was a marked decrease in the number of repeat cases especially in patients who are suffering from heart conditions and pneumonia.
General Hospital Readmission Rates
The study spanned from 2000 to 2013 involved Medicare patients who were confined in U.S. acute care hospitals within the aforementioned period.
As detailed in the Affordable Care Act, healthcare facilities with the highest readmission cases will be penalized. To avoid circumstances such as this, hospitals are paying more attention to the needs of their patients. Based on the data, the hospitals with the poorest performance before the law was passed registered the greatest improvement.
Affordable Care Act
With the effort to improve the kind of services that are offered in hospitals, the government passed the Affordable Care Act back in 2010. The implementation of the new law took place in 2012.
The findings reveal that readmission rates would be lower when there are monetary penalties involved. The study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, looked into the information and they had interesting notes about the effect of the law to the service provided by hospitals.
As detailed in EurekAlert!, the readmission rates for all healthcare providers improved after the passage of the act. However, it was the hospitals with the poorest performance that registered the greatest improvement. The study looked into the status of patients admitted for pneumonia, myocardial infarction, and congestive heart failure.
Hospitals evaluated were categorized as highest performance, average performance, low performance, and lowest performance. Healthcare providers in the highest performance category are not penalized but the average performance down to the lowest performance for general hospital readmission rates need to pay the penalty imposed by law.
