A U.S. program that penalizes hospitals with high readmission rates may not be as effective as previously thought, according to a new study.
The study found that although hospital readmissions decreased among patients with heart failure in the U.S. after implementation of the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), Canada experienced a similar decrease even though it had no program like the HRRP, according to an April 10, 2019 article in MedPage Today. This suggests that another factor may be behind reduced admission rates in both countries, such as improved care for patients with heart failure, the authors said.
The HRRP took effect in the U.S. in 2012 as part of the Affordable Care Act. It allows the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to withhold payments from hospitals with higher-than-expected 30-day readmission rates for conditions among Medicare patients such as heart failure, heart attack, and pneumonia.
In an accompanying editorial, Ashish Jha, K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, wrote that the study adds to the “mounting evidence that the [HRRP] program is failing to live up to expectations.”
Read the MedPage Today article: Hospital Readmissions: Failing to Meet Expectations?