Rethinking Thirty-Day Hospital Readmissions: Shorter Intervals Might Be Better Indicators Of Quality Of Care.

ABSTRACT: Public reporting and payment programs in the United States have embraced thirty-day readmissions as an indicator of between-hospital variation in the quality of care, despite limited evidence supporting this interval. We examined risk-standardized thirty-day risk of unplanned inpatient readmission at the hospital level for Medicare patients ages sixty-five and older in four states and for three conditions: acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia. The hospital-level quality signal captured in readmission risk was highest on the first day after discharge and declined rapidly until it reached a nadir at seven days, as indicated by a decreasing intracluster correlation coefficient. Similar patterns were seen across states and diagnoses. The rapid decay in the quality signal s

SUBMITTER: Chin DL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5457284 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature