Background: The United States sees over 35 million hospital discharges a year with a 20% readmission rate. Unplanned readmissions amount to 20 billion dollars annually. Efforts to prevent readmissions impact patient’s overall morbidity/mortality and alleviate the financial burden on health care systems. To that effect, the United States health care reform, under the Affordable Care [...]

Background: Hospital Readmission Reduction Program(HRRP) implemented by CMS as part of Affordable Care Act (ACA) applies financial penalties to hospitals that have higher-than-expected readmission rates for common conditions such as AMI, pneumonia, and HF. CMS extended this program to include COPD for the fiscal year (FY) 2015. While there has been a reduction in readmissions, [...]

Background: According to a report of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) that looked at hospital admissions in 2013, the care of hospitalized malnourished patients costs twice as much as those without malnourishment due to prolonged hospital stays and increased readmission rates. Furthermore, up to 30 to 50 percent of patients are malnourished upon [...]

Background: The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) uses 30-day readmissions as a measure of quality for a hospital system. However, there is growing literature that 30-day readmissions may not be a good measure of quality since most readmissions towards the end of 30-day window are likely not preventable. Therefore, using a shorter window [...]

Background: The 7- and 30-day patient readmission rates are tracked by hospitals and are used as a metric to measure physicians’ quality of patient care. Several tools currently predict and prevent early readmission rates based on patient-specific characteristics. However, few studies have demonstrated if physician-specific characteristics play a role. The purpose of this study is [...]

Background: Hospital readmission rate is viewed as an indirect indicator of quality of care provided by a hospital. We completed a small pilot study looking at a multidisciplinary bedside huddle in the 24 – 48 hours before discharge which decreased readmission rates in high risk patients from 36% to 20% in a small pilot study. [...]