Hospitals are expensive and often cause harm, so various policies have focused on reducing hospital use. One such policy—the Affordable Care Act’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), which penalizes hospitals for higher-than-expected readmission rates—was most likely the impetus for recently reported declines in these rates for Medicare patients.
In a February 26, 2016 post on The Health Care Blog, Ashish Jha, K.T. Li Professor of International Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote about the HRRP and what the declining readmission rates might mean. He said that there’s been concern that falling rates are somehow linked with an increase in patients being admitted to hospitals for “observation”—in other words, that they’re still being admitted to the hospital, only under a different classification.
A new study looked at that question and found no link—which means that there are indeed fewer people being readmitted to hospitals. But Jha added that it’s still not known whether the HRRP has actually improved quality of care. “The real challenge is in figuring out whether patients are better off,” Jha wrote.
Read Jha’s Health Care Blog post: Readmissions, Observation, and Improving Hospital Care
Learn more
VA hospitals compare well on deaths, readmission rates (Harvard Chan School news)
Debating hospital readmissions penalties and ‘pay for performance’ (Harvard Chan School news)
Read Jha’s blog, An Ounce of Evidence